A Virtual Cinematographer for Presenter Tracking in 4K Lecture Videos

Lecture recording has become an important part of the provision of accessible tertiary education and having good autonomous recording and processing systems is necessary to make it feasible. In this work, we develop and evaluate a video processing framework that uses 4K video to track the lecturer and frame him/her in a way that simulates a human camera operator. We also investigate general issues pertaining to blackboard usage and its influence on cinematography decisions. We found that post-processing produced better tracking and framing results when compared to some real-time approaches. Furthermore, the entire pipeline can run on a commodity PC and will complete within the suggested time of 300% of the input video length. In fact, our testing showed that 60% of the total processing time can be ascribed to I/O operations. With the removal of redundant reads and writes, this proportion can be reduced. Finally, some algorithms can be remapped to parallel versions which will exploit multicore CPUs or GPUs if these are available

Multimodal Indexing of Presentation Videos

This thesis presents four novel methods to help users efficiently and effectively retrieve information from unstructured and unsourced multimedia sources, in particular the increasing amount and variety of presentation videos such as those in e-learning, conference recordings, corporate talks, and student presentations. We demonstrate a system to summarize, index and cross-reference such videos, and measure the quality of the produced indexes as perceived by the end users. We introduce four major semantic indexing cues: text, speaker faces, graphics, and mosaics, going beyond standard tag based searches and simple video playbacks. This work aims at recognizing visual content "in the wild", where the system cannot rely on any additional information besides the video itself. For text, within a scene text detection and recognition framework, we present a novel locally optimal adaptive binarization algorithm, implemented with integral histograms. It determines of an optimal threshold that maximizes the between-classes variance within a subwindow, with computational complexity independent from the size of the window itself. We obtain character recognition rates of 74%, as validated against ground truth of 8 presentation videos spanning over 1 hour and 45 minutes, which almost doubles the baseline performance of an open source OCR engine. For speaker faces, we detect, track, match, and finally select a humanly preferred face icon per speaker, based on three quality measures: resolution, amount of skin, and pose. We register a 87% accordance (51 out of 58 speakers) between the face indexes automatically generated from three unstructured presentation videos of approximately 45 minutes each, and human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. For diagrams, we locate graphics inside frames showing a projected slide, cluster them according to an on-line algorithm based on a combination of visual and temporal information, and select and color-correct their representatives to match human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. We register 71% accuracy (57 out of 81 unique diagrams properly identified, selected and color-corrected) on three hours of videos containing five different presentations. For mosaics, we combine two existing suturing measures, to extend video images into in-the-world coordinate system. A set of frames to be registered into a mosaic are sampled according to the PTZ camera movement, which is computed through least square estimation starting from the luminance constancy assumption. A local features based stitching algorithm is then applied to estimate the homography among a set of video frames and median blending is used to render pixels in overlapping regions of the mosaic. For two of these indexes, namely faces and diagrams, we present two novel MTurk-derived user data collections to determine viewer preferences, and show that they are matched in selection by our methods. The net result work of this thesis allows users to search, inside a video collection as well as within a single video clip, for a segment of presentation by professor X on topic Y, containing graph Z

A utilização da plataforma Educast@fccn, como ferramenta de gravação de aulas no ambiente de e-learning português

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.No decorrer desta tese de mestrado, será estudado o processo de gravação de aulas em suporte de vídeo digital, na comunidade RCTS (Rede Ciência Tecnologia e Sociedade) e a sua posterior disponibilização aos alunos na internet e dispositivos móveis. A plataforma em análise é o Educast@fccn, que possibilita a gravação de aulas, eventos institucionais, seminários e workshops. A plataforma permite através de software e hardware dedicado gravar, editar e publicar conteúdos de uma forma integrada, combinando de forma síncrona, o sinal de áudio, vídeo e slide show apresentado em ambiente de sala de aula. Este estudo visa obter uma compreensão mais aprofundada dos hábitos e práticas de produção de conteúdos e-learning, baseados em formato audiovisual, no seio da comunidade académica e científica portuguesa. Serão ainda foco de estudo, as formas de disseminação e consumo dos conteúdos pelos alunos, o nível de produção nacional, o número de utilizadores, número de visualizações por formato, instituições aderentes e boas práticas de utilização da plataforma.ABSTRACT: During this Master Thesis, will be studied the process of lecture recording in digital video, in RCTS (Rede Ciência Tecnologia e Sociedade - Science Technology and Society Network) community and its subsequent availability to students in the internet and mobile devices. The platform is Educast@fccn, which enables the recording of lessons, corporate events, seminars and workshops. The platform allows through software and hardware to record, edit and publish content in an integrated way, combining synchronously the audio, video and slide show signals, presented in the classroom environment. This study aims to obtain a deeper understanding of the habits and production practices of e-learning content, based on audio-visual format, within the Portuguese academic and scientific community. This study will also focus on dissemination and consumption of contents by students, the national level production, number of users, number of views per format, member institutions and best practices of platform usage

Retailing Religion: Business Promotionalism in American Christian Churches in the Twentieth Century

Evangelist Billy Graham once remarked, "We are selling the greatest product on earth - belief in God - why shouldn't we promote it as effectively as we promote a bar of soap?" His comparison is misleading in its simplicity, since it strikes at the heart of the complex relationship between religion and the modern American marketplace. Retailing Religion examines how American Christian churches in the twentieth century promoted their institutions and messages by adopting modern public relations, advertising, personal sales, and marketing techniques from the secular business community. Retailing Religion develops four principal themes. First, Christian churches in the twentieth century followed the promotional trends of corporate firms with only a slight lag time. Second, this borrowing nurtured the growth of rationalism and individualism in American Christianity, which contributed significantly to the religion's modernization. This transformation was especially pronounced in churches' growing dependence on rational methods and numerical metrics, and in their transition from a producer orientation to a consumer orientation. Third, church promotional efforts increased not the secularization but the pluralization of American Christianity by erecting a platform for cooperation among churches, denominations, and religions. Fourth, church promotionalism fostered an ongoing tension between their sacred mission and their secular methods. Wrestling with this tension, both advocates and critics of church promotion labored throughout the century to develop historical, theological, and pragmatic arguments to defend or denounce the practices. The tension was so complex and often contradictory that some of the strongest advocates for religious retailing were also its biggest critics. The key historical actors in this study are the leading pioneers and practitioners of church promotion: organizations such as the Religious Public Relations Council; experts such as Gaines Dobbins, Philip Kotler, Peter Drucker, and George Barna; pastors such as Robert Schuller, Bill Hybels, and Rick Warren; and critics such as David Wells and Os Guinness. In tracing their adoption, development, implementation, and dissemination of the latest business promotional methods, Retailing Religion provides a broad portrait of American religion's struggle to remain both faithful to the divine and relevant to the world

HSCI2012: proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Hands-on Science

Including 1st Childrens’ Summit on Hands-on Science & Environmental Education. The core topic of the 9th Hands-on Science Conference are “Science Education, Environment and Society" and "Reconnecting Society with Nature through Hands-on Science”.Livro que reúne os trabalho extensos aceites para publicação nos proceedings da 9th HSCI conferenc

Research on Teaching and Learning In Biology, Chemistry and Physics In ESERA 2013 Conference

This paper provides an overview of the topics in educational research that were published in the ESERA 2013 conference proceedings. The aim of the research was to identify what aspects of the teacher-student-content interaction were investigated frequently and what have been studied rarely. We used the categorization system developed by Kinnunen, Lampiselkä, Malmi and Meisalo (2016) and altogether 184 articles were analyzed. The analysis focused on secondary and tertiary level biology, chemistry, physics, and science education. The results showed that most of the studies focus on either the teacher’s pedagogical actions or on the student - content relationship. All other aspects were studied considerably less. For example, the teachers’ thoughts about the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the goals and the content, and the teachers’ conceptions of the students’ actions towards achieving the goals were studied only rarely. Discussion about the scope and the coverage of the research in science education in Europe is needed.Peer reviewe

Anthropocentric Video Segmentation for Lecture Webcasts

Many lecture recording and presentation systems transmit slides or chalkboard content along with a small video of the instructor. As a result, two areas of the screen are competing for the viewer's attention, causing the widely known split-attention effect. Face and body gestures, such as pointing, do not appear in the context of the slides or the board. To eliminate this problem, this article proposes to extract the lecturer from the video stream and paste his or her image onto the board or slide image. As a result, the lecturer acting in front of the board or slides becomes the center of attention. The entire lecture presentation becomes more human-centered. This article presents both an analysis of the underlying psychological problems and an explanation of signal processing techniques that are applied in a concrete system. The presented algorithm is able to extract and overlay the lecturer online and in real time at full video resolution

Proceedings of the International Congress on Interdisciplinarity in Social and Human Sciences

Interdisciplinarity is the main topic and the main goal of this conference. Since the sixteen century with the creation of the first Academy of Sciences, in Napoles (Italy) (1568), and before that with the creation of the Fine Arts Academies, the world of science and arts began to work independently, on the contrary of the Academy of Plato, in Classical Antiquity, where science, art and sport went interconnected. Over time, specific sciences began to be independent, and the specificity of sciences caused an increased difficulty in mutual understanding. The same trend has affected the Human and Social Sciences. Each of the specific sciences gave rise to a wide range of particular fields. This has the advantage of allowing the deepening of specialised knowledge, but it means that there is often only a piecemeal approach of the research object, not taking into account the its overall complexity. So, it is important to work for a better understanding of the scientific phenomena with the complementarity of the different sciences, in an interdisciplinary perspective. With this growing specialisation of sciences, Interdisciplinarity acquired more relevance for scientists to find moreencompassing and useful answers for their research questions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Proceedings of the International Congress on Interdisciplinarity in Social and Human Sciences

Interdisciplinarity is the main topic and the main goal of this conference. Since the sixteen century with the creation of the first Academy of Sciences, in Napoles (Italy) (1568), and before that with the creation of the Fine Arts Academies, the world of science and arts began to work independently, on the contrary of the Academy of Plato, in Classical Antiquity, where science, art and sport went interconnected. Over time, specific sciences began to be independent, and the specificity of sciences caused an increased difficulty in mutual understanding. The same trend has affected the Human and Social Sciences. Each of the specific sciences gave rise to a wide range of particular fields. This has the advantage of allowing the deepening of specialised knowledge, but it means that there is often only a piecemeal approach of the research object, not taking into account the its overall complexity. So, it is important to work for a better understanding of the scientific phenomena with the complementarity of the different sciences, in an interdisciplinary perspective. With this growing specialisation of sciences, Interdisciplinarity acquired more relevance for scientists to find moreencompassing and useful answers for their research questions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio