SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

Hierarchical video summarisation in reference frame subspace

In this paper, a hierarchical video structure summarization approach using Laplacian Eigenmap is proposed, where a small set of reference frames is selected from the video sequence to form a reference subspace to measure the dissimilarity between two arbitrary frames. In the proposed summarization scheme, the shot-level key frames are first detected from the continuity of inter-frame dissimilarity, and the sub-shot level and scene level representative frames are then summarized by using k-mean clustering. The experiment is carried on both test videos and movies, and the results show that in comparison with a similar approach using latent semantic analysis, the proposed approach using Laplacian Eigenmap can achieve a better recall rate in keyframe detection, and gives an efficient hierarchical summarization at sub shot, shot and scene levels subsequently

Interactive searching and browsing of video archives: using text and using image matching

Over the last number of decades much research work has been done in the general area of video and audio analysis. Initially the applications driving this included capturing video in digital form and then being able to store, transmit and render it, which involved a large effort to develop compression and encoding standards. The technology needed to do all this is now easily available and cheap, with applications of digital video processing now commonplace, ranging from CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) for security, to home capture of broadcast TV on home DVRs for personal viewing. One consequence of the development in technology for creating, storing and distributing digital video is that there has been a huge increase in the volume of digital video, and this in turn has created a need for techniques to allow effective management of this video, and by that we mean content management. In the BBC, for example, the archives department receives approximately 500,000 queries per year and has over 350,000 hours of content in its library. Having huge archives of video information is hardly any benefit if we have no effective means of being able to locate video clips which are of relevance to whatever our information needs may be. In this chapter we report our work on developing two specific retrieval and browsing tools for digital video information. Both of these are based on an analysis of the captured video for the purpose of automatically structuring into shots or higher level semantic units like TV news stories. Some also include analysis of the video for the automatic detection of features such as the presence or absence of faces. Both include some elements of searching, where a user specifies a query or information need, and browsing, where a user is allowed to browse through sets of retrieved video shots. We support the presentation of these tools with illustrations of actual video retrieval systems developed and working on hundreds of hours of video content

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

Adaptive threshold scheme for touchscreen gesture continuous authentication using sensor trust

In this study we produce a continuous authentication scheme for mobile devices that adjusts an adaptive threshold for touchscreen interactions based on trust in passively collected sensor data. Our framework unobtrusively compares real-time sensor data of a user to historic data and adjusts a trust parameter based on the similarity. We show that the trust parameter can be used to adjust an adaptive threshold in continuous authentication schemes. The framework passively models temporal, spatial and activity scenarios using sensor data such as location, surrounding devices, wi-fi networks, ambient noise, movements, user activity, ambient light, proximity to objects and atmospheric pressure from study participants. Deviations from the models increases the level of threat the device perceives from the scenario. We also model the user touchscreen interactions. The touchscreen interactions are authenticated against a threshold that is continually adjusted based on the perceived trust. This scheme provides greater nuance between security and usability, enabling more refined decisions. We present our novel framework and threshold adjustment criteria and validate our framework on two state-of-the-art sensor datasets. Our framework more than halves the false acceptance and false rejection rates of a static threshold system

Integrating heterogeneous open-source software into web browsers using AMICO:WEB

A web browser provides a uniform user interface to different types of information. Making this interface universally accessible and more interactive is a long term goal still far from being achieved. Universally accessible browsers require novel interaction modalities and additional functionalities, for which existing browsers tend to provide only partial solutions. Although functionality for web accessibility can be found as open-source and free software components, their reuse and integration is complex because they were developed in diverse implementation environments, following standards and conventions incompatible with the web. To enable the integration of existing partial solutions within a mainstream web browser environment, we have developed a middleware infrastructure, AMICO:WEB. This enables browser access to a wide variety of open source and free software components. The main contribution of AMICO:WEB is in enabling the syntactic interoperability between web extension mechanisms and a variety of integration mechanisms used by open-source and free software components. It also bridges the semantic differences between the high-level world of web XML-based APIs and the low-level APIs of the device-oriented world. We discuss the design decisions made during the development of AMICO:WEB in the context of web accessibility, using two typical usage scenarios: one describing a disabled user using a mainstream web browser with additional interaction modalities; another describing a non-disabled user browsing in a suboptimal interaction situation