Validating the detection of everyday concepts in visual lifelogs

The Microsoft SenseCam is a small lightweight wearable camera used to passively capture photos and other sensor readings from a user's day-to-day activities. It can capture up to 3,000 images per day, equating to almost 1 million images per year. It is used to aid memory by creating a personal multimedia lifelog, or visual recording of the wearer's life. However the sheer volume of image data captured within a visual lifelog creates a number of challenges, particularly for locating relevant content. Within this work, we explore the applicability of semantic concept detection, a method often used within video retrieval, on the novel domain of visual lifelogs. A concept detector models the correspondence between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts (such as indoors, outdoors, people, buildings, etc.) using supervised machine learning. By doing so it determines the probability of a concept's presence. We apply detection of 27 everyday semantic concepts on a lifelog collection composed of 257,518 SenseCam images from 5 users. The results were then evaluated on a subset of 95,907 images, to determine the precision for detection of each semantic concept and to draw some interesting inferences on the lifestyles of those 5 users. We additionally present future applications of concept detection within the domain of lifelogging. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Everyday concept detection in visual lifelogs: validation, relationships and trends

The Microsoft SenseCam is a small lightweight wearable camera used to passively capture photos and other sensor readings from a user's day-to-day activities. It can capture up to 3,000 images per day, equating to almost 1 million images per year. It is used to aid memory by creating a personal multimedia lifelog, or visual recording of the wearer's life. However the sheer volume of image data captured within a visual lifelog creates a number of challenges, particularly for locating relevant content. Within this work, we explore the applicability of semantic concept detection, a method often used within video retrieval, on the novel domain of visual lifelogs. A concept detector models the correspondence between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts (such as indoors, outdoors, people, buildings, etc.) using supervised machine learning. By doing so it determines the probability of a concept's presence. We apply detection of 27 everyday semantic concepts on a lifelog collection composed of 257,518 SenseCam images from 5 users. The results were then evaluated on a subset of 95,907 images, to determine the precision for detection of each semantic concept. We conduct further analysis on the temporal consistency, co-occurance and trends within the detected concepts to more extensively investigate the robustness of the detectors within this novel domain. We additionally present future applications of concept detection within the domain of lifelogging

Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbilTS) framework : a solution for building complex multimodal data capture and interactive systems

Contemporary Data Capture and Interactive Systems (DCIS) systems are tied in with various technical complexities such as multimodal data types, diverse hardware and software components, time synchronisation issues and distributed deployment configurations. Building these systems is inherently difficult and requires addressing of these complexities before the intended and purposeful functionalities can be attained. The technical issues are often common and similar among diverse applications. This thesis presents the Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbiITS) framework, a generic solution to address the technical complexities in building DCISs. The proposed solution is an abstract software framework that can be extended and customised to any application requirements. UbiITS includes all fundamental software components, techniques, system level layer abstractions and reference architecture as a collection to enable the systematic construction of complex DCISs. This work details four case studies to showcase the versatility and extensibility of UbiITS framework’s functionalities and demonstrate how it was employed to successfully solve a range of technical requirements. In each case UbiITS operated as the core element of each application. Additionally, these case studies are novel systems by themselves in each of their domains. Longstanding technical issues such as flexibly integrating and interoperating multimodal tools, precise time synchronisation, etc., were resolved in each application by employing UbiITS. The framework enabled establishing a functional system infrastructure in these cases, essentially opening up new lines of research in each discipline where these research approaches would not have been possible without the infrastructure provided by the framework. The thesis further presents a sample implementation of the framework on a device firmware exhibiting its capability to be directly implemented on a hardware platform. Summary metrics are also produced to establish the complexity, reusability, extendibility, implementation and maintainability characteristics of the framework.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants - EP/F02553X/1, 114433 and 11394

Learning and Teaching with Geomedia

International audienceThis book presents a range of educational approaches and ideas around learning with and about geomedia, taking into account the potential as well as the risks and challenges associated with the use geomedia in education. This includes understanding the inherently biasednature of maps and other spatial representations; the power of geomedia produced by institutions, as well as the power of geomedia produced by lay persons; the use of geoinformation in the control and surveillance of individuals and groups, and the opportunities of georeferenced data to foster innovative knowledge. Addressing these aspects in essence means preparing students for an emerging Geoinformation society

Leveraging Multimedia to Advance Science by Disseminating a Greater Variety of Scholarly Contributions in More Accessible Formats

For the welfare of the scientific community, we intentionally “rock the boat” about the way we conduct, recognize, and disseminate scholarly contributions. As a scientific community, we are doing ourselves a great disservice by ignoring the insights, artifacts, discoveries, and conversations that naturally occur in the scientific process of advancing knowledge that do not fit into the narrowly defined form of print-style papers. By failing to recognize, reward, and publish the wide variety of scholarly contributions that do not suit print-style papers, we hinder scientific progress, devalue important and necessary contributions to science, and demotivate these types of vital contributions. Although over three centuries of scientific publishing has demonstrated the effectiveness of the print medium for conveying scholarly knowledge, the print-style paper captures only a single form of scholarly contribution in a highly limited media format. Unfortunately, the current tenure and promotion process recognizes only this one form of scientific contribution. As a result, science at large advances inevitably only by this single type of contribution. Given the radical advances in audiovisual technologies, storage and bandwidth capacities, public virtual infrastructure, and global acceptance of user-generated open content, the time is ripe to exploit the possibility of publishing more forms of scholarly contributions in a publicly available multimedia format (e.g., video). In this paper, we examine the feasibility of this proposal, develop a model to demonstrate the sustainability of this approach, and discuss potential limitations

CCTV Technology Handbook

This CCTV Technology Handbook provides emergency responders, law enforcement security managers, and other security specialists with a reference to aid in planning, designing, and purchasing a CCTV system. This handbook includes a description of the capabilities and limitations of CCTV components used in security applications

How to Use Litigation Technology to Prepare & Present Your Case at Trial October 27, 2021

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held October 27, 2021