The DICEMAN description schemes for still images and video sequences

To address the problem of visual content description, two Description Schemes (DSs) developed within the context of a European ACTS project known as DICEMAN, are presented. The DSs, designed based on an analogy with well-known tools for document description, describe both the structure and semantics of still images and video sequences. The overall structure of both DSs including the various sub-DSs and descriptors (Ds) of which they are composed is described. In each case, the hierarchical sub-DS for describing structure can be constructed using automatic (or semi-automatic) image/video analysis tools. The hierarchical sub-DSs for describing the semantics, however, are constructed by a user. The integration of the two DSs into a video indexing application currently under development in DICEMAN is also briefly described.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Smart environment monitoring through micro unmanned aerial vehicles

In recent years, the improvements of small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in terms of flight time, automatic control, and remote transmission are promoting the development of a wide range of practical applications. In aerial video surveillance, the monitoring of broad areas still has many challenges due to the achievement of different tasks in real-time, including mosaicking, change detection, and object detection. In this thesis work, a small-scale UAV based vision system to maintain regular surveillance over target areas is proposed. The system works in two modes. The first mode allows to monitor an area of interest by performing several flights. During the first flight, it creates an incremental geo-referenced mosaic of an area of interest and classifies all the known elements (e.g., persons) found on the ground by an improved Faster R-CNN architecture previously trained. In subsequent reconnaissance flights, the system searches for any changes (e.g., disappearance of persons) that may occur in the mosaic by a histogram equalization and RGB-Local Binary Pattern (RGB-LBP) based algorithm. If present, the mosaic is updated. The second mode, allows to perform a real-time classification by using, again, our improved Faster R-CNN model, useful for time-critical operations. Thanks to different design features, the system works in real-time and performs mosaicking and change detection tasks at low-altitude, thus allowing the classification even of small objects. The proposed system was tested by using the whole set of challenging video sequences contained in the UAV Mosaicking and Change Detection (UMCD) dataset and other public datasets. The evaluation of the system by well-known performance metrics has shown remarkable results in terms of mosaic creation and updating, as well as in terms of change detection and object detection

Automatic Generation of Video Summaries for Historical Films

A video summary is a sequence of video clips extracted from a longer video. Much shorter than the original, the summary preserves its essential messages. In the project ECHO (European Chronicles On-line) a system was developed to store and manage large collections of historical films for the preservation of cultural heritage. At the University of Mannheim we have developed the video summarization component of the ECHO system. In this paper we discuss the particular challenges the historical film material poses, and how we have designed new video processing algorithms and modified existing ones to cope with noisy black-and-white films. We also report empirical results from the use of our summarization tool at the four major European national video archives

The theatre and its screen double

This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg's Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012). It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. After a brief evocation of Artaud's writings in "theatre and cruelty" and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre's evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the "choreographic unconscious," as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell's dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the "camera-actor." A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell's direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance

Mosaic narrative a poetics of cinematic new media narrative

This thesis proposes the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative as a tool for theorising the creation and telling of cinematic stories in a digital environment. As such the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is designed to assist creators of new media narrative to design dramatically compelling screen based stories by drawing from established theories of cinema and emerging theories of new media. In doing so it validates the crucial element of cinematic storytelling in the digital medium, which due to its fragmentary, variable and re-combinatory nature, affords the opportunity for audience interaction. The Poetics of Mosaic Narrative re-asserts the dramatic and cinematic nature of narrative in new media by drawing upon the dramatic theory of Aristotle’s Poetics, the cinematic theories of the 1920s Russian Film Theorists and contemporary Neo-Formalists, the narrative theories of the 1960s French Structuralists, and the scriptwriting theories of contemporary cinema. In particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the prominent new media theorist, Lev Manovich, as a means of investigating and creating a practical poetics. The key element of the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is the expansion of the previously forgotten and undeveloped Russian Formalist concept of cinematurgy which is vital to the successful development of new media storytelling theory and practice. This concept, as originally proposed but not elaborated by Kazansky, encompasses the notion of the creation of cinematic new media narrative as a mosaic – integrally driven by the narrative systems of plot, as well as the cinematic systems of visual style created by the techniques of cinema- montage, cinematography and mise-en-scene