Media aesthetics based multimedia storytelling.

Since the earliest of times, humans have been interested in recording their life experiences, for future reference and for storytelling purposes. This task of recording experiences --i.e., both image and video capture-- has never before in history been as easy as it is today. This is creating a digital information overload that is becoming a great concern for the people that are trying to preserve their life experiences. As high-resolution digital still and video cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of multimedia, are being downloaded to personal hard drives, and also uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. The work presented in this dissertation is a contribution in the area of multimedia organization, as well as automatic selection of media for storytelling purposes, which eases the human task of summarizing a collection of images or videos in order to be shared with other people. As opposed to some prior art in this area, we have taken an approach in which neither user generated tags nor comments --that describe the photographs, either in their local or on-line repositories-- are taken into account, and also no user interaction with the algorithms is expected. We take an image analysis approach where both the context images --e.g. images from online social networks to which the image stories are going to be uploaded--, and the collection images --i.e., the collection of images or videos that needs to be summarized into a story--, are analyzed using image processing algorithms. This allows us to extract relevant metadata that can be used in the summarization process. Multimedia-storytellers usually follow three main steps when preparing their stories: first they choose the main story characters, the main events to describe, and finally from these media sub-groups, they choose the media based on their relevance to the story as well as based on their aesthetic value. Therefore, one of the main contributions of our work has been the design of computational models --both regression based, as well as classification based-- that correlate well with human perception of the aesthetic value of images and videos. These computational aesthetics models have been integrated into automatic selection algorithms for multimedia storytelling, which are another important contribution of our work. A human centric approach has been used in all experiments where it was feasible, and also in order to assess the final summarization results, i.e., humans are always the final judges of our algorithms, either by inspecting the aesthetic quality of the media, or by inspecting the final story generated by our algorithms. We are aware that a perfect automatically generated story summary is very hard to obtain, given the many subjective factors that play a role in such a creative process; rather, the presented approach should be seen as a first step in the storytelling creative process which removes some of the ground work that would be tedious and time consuming for the user. Overall, the main contributions of this work can be capitalized in three: (1) new media aesthetics models for both images and videos that correlate with human perception, (2) new scalable multimedia collection structures that ease the process of media summarization, and finally, (3) new media selection algorithms that are optimized for multimedia storytelling purposes.Postprint (published version

Information retrieval challenges of maintaining a context-aware human digital memory

The volume of personal digital data captured from today's content creation devices, such as digital cameras, digital video recorders and sensecams pose many challenges for organising and retrieving content for users. By utilising content and contextual analysis along with an understanding of the usage scenarios involved, it is possible to develop effective information retrieval technologies for these personal archives. In this talk I will discuss how we, at the Centre for Digital Video Processing, Dublin City University, have employed both content and contextual analysis to automatically organise human digital memory (sensecam) collections and I will focus specifically on how we have employed techniques from photo and video retrieval in the novel domain of human digital memories

Visualizing and Interacting with Concept Hierarchies

Concept Hierarchies and Formal Concept Analysis are theoretically well grounded and largely experimented methods. They rely on line diagrams called Galois lattices for visualizing and analysing object-attribute sets. Galois lattices are visually seducing and conceptually rich for experts. However they present important drawbacks due to their concept oriented overall structure: analysing what they show is difficult for non experts, navigation is cumbersome, interaction is poor, and scalability is a deep bottleneck for visual interpretation even for experts. In this paper we introduce semantic probes as a means to overcome many of these problems and extend usability and application possibilities of traditional FCA visualization methods. Semantic probes are visual user centred objects which extract and organize reduced Galois sub-hierarchies. They are simpler, clearer, and they provide a better navigation support through a rich set of interaction possibilities. Since probe driven sub-hierarchies are limited to users focus, scalability is under control and interpretation is facilitated. After some successful experiments, several applications are being developed with the remaining problem of finding a compromise between simplicity and conceptual expressivity

Exploratory Browsing

In recent years the digital media has influenced many areas of our life. The transition from analogue to digital has substantially changed our ways of dealing with media collections. Today‟s interfaces for managing digital media mainly offer fixed linear models corresponding to the underlying technical concepts (folders, events, albums, etc.), or the metaphors borrowed from the analogue counterparts (e.g., stacks, film rolls). However, people‟s mental interpretations of their media collections often go beyond the scope of linear scan. Besides explicit search with specific goals, current interfaces can not sufficiently support the explorative and often non-linear behavior. This dissertation presents an exploration of interface design to enhance the browsing experience with media collections. The main outcome of this thesis is a new model of Exploratory Browsing to guide the design of interfaces to support the full range of browsing activities, especially the Exploratory Browsing. We define Exploratory Browsing as the behavior when the user is uncertain about her or his targets and needs to discover areas of interest (exploratory), in which she or he can explore in detail and possibly find some acceptable items (browsing). According to the browsing objectives, we group browsing activities into three categories: Search Browsing, General Purpose Browsing and Serendipitous Browsing. In the context of this thesis, Exploratory Browsing refers to the latter two browsing activities, which goes beyond explicit search with specific objectives. We systematically explore the design space of interfaces to support the Exploratory Browsing experience. Applying the methodology of User-Centered Design, we develop eight prototypes, covering two main usage contexts of browsing with personal collections and in online communities. The main studied media types are photographs and music. The main contribution of this thesis lies in deepening the understanding of how people‟s exploratory behavior has an impact on the interface design. This thesis contributes to the field of interface design for media collections in several aspects. With the goal to inform the interface design to support the Exploratory Browsing experience with media collections, we present a model of Exploratory Browsing, covering the full range of exploratory activities around media collections. We investigate this model in different usage contexts and develop eight prototypes. The substantial implications gathered during the development and evaluation of these prototypes inform the further refinement of our model: We uncover the underlying transitional relations between browsing activities and discover several stimulators to encourage a fluid and effective activity transition. Based on this model, we propose a catalogue of general interface characteristics, and employ this catalogue as criteria to analyze the effectiveness of our prototypes. We also present several general suggestions for designing interfaces for media collections

Photo mementos: designing digital media to represent ourselves at home

We examine photos in the family home as examples of mementos, cherished objects kept in memory of a person or event. In a ‘memory tour’, we asked participants to walk us through their family home selecting and discussing significant mnemonic objects. With each personal narrative we recorded memento location, i.e. the room, place within the room and any nearby objects. Although photos were not the most popular mementos, when chosen they were highly significant, and often unique. These photo mementos were usually not representational but symbolic, where only the owner knows their many layers of meaning. Photos from different times in the person’s life were strategically placed in different rooms. Their location afforded different functions, e.g. photo mementos in family spaces reinforced family bonds, photo mementos in personal spaces were for immersive reminiscing, whereas those in public rooms had an aesthetic value and to spark conversations with visitors. Finally photo mementos were rarely isolated: they were clustered in displayed albums or stored with other memorabilia in boxes or drawers to represent a stage in life. We explore the implications of these findings by designing potential new home photo technologies, looking at how new designs might support the types of behaviours observed. Through four conceptual designs we examine how photo technology might integrate into the practices and aesthetic of the family home. The concepts led to a set of concluding considerations that need to be taken into account when designing new forms of display technology that are part of a larger domestic photo system

Automatic Synchronization of Multi-User Photo Galleries

In this paper we address the issue of photo galleries synchronization, where pictures related to the same event are collected by different users. Existing solutions to address the problem are usually based on unrealistic assumptions, like time consistency across photo galleries, and often heavily rely on heuristics, limiting therefore the applicability to real-world scenarios. We propose a solution that achieves better generalization performance for the synchronization task compared to the available literature. The method is characterized by three stages: at first, deep convolutional neural network features are used to assess the visual similarity among the photos; then, pairs of similar photos are detected across different galleries and used to construct a graph; eventually, a probabilistic graphical model is used to estimate the temporal offset of each pair of galleries, by traversing the minimum spanning tree extracted from this graph. The experimental evaluation is conducted on four publicly available datasets covering different types of events, demonstrating the strength of our proposed method. A thorough discussion of the obtained results is provided for a critical assessment of the quality in synchronization.Comment: ACCEPTED to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi

Digital life stories: Semi-automatic (auto)biographies within lifelog collections

Our life stories enable us to reflect upon and share our personal histories. Through emerging digital technologies the possibility of collecting life experiences digitally is increasingly feasible; consequently so is the potential to create a digital counterpart to our personal narratives. In this work, lifelogging tools are used to collect digital artifacts continuously and passively throughout our day. These include images, documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity. This range of data when brought together is known as a lifelog. Given the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections, it is clear that there are significant challenges to be addressed in order to achieve coherent and meaningful digital narratives of our events from our life histories. This work investigates the construction of personal digital narratives from lifelog collections. It examines the underlying questions, issues and challenges relating to construction of personal digital narratives from lifelogs. Fundamentally, it addresses how to organize and transform data sampled from an individual’s day-to-day activities into a coherent narrative account. This enquiry is enabled by three 20-month long-term lifelogs collected by participants and produces a narrative system which enables the semi-automatic construction of digital stories from lifelog content. Inspired by probative studies conducted into current practices of curation, from which a set of fundamental requirements are established, this solution employs a 2-dimensional spatial framework for storytelling. It delivers integrated support for the structuring of lifelog content and its distillation into storyform through information retrieval approaches. We describe and contribute flexible algorithmic approaches to achieve both. Finally, this research inquiry yields qualitative and quantitative insights into such digital narratives and their generation, composition and construction. The opportunities for such personal narrative accounts to enable recollection, reminiscence and reflection with the collection owners are established and its benefit in sharing past personal experience experiences is outlined. Finally, in a novel investigation with motivated third parties we demonstrate the opportunities such narrative accounts may have beyond the scope of the collection owner in: personal, societal and cultural explorations, artistic endeavours and as a generational heirloom

A component framework for personalized multimedia applications

Eine praktikable Unterstützung für eine dynamische Erstellung von personalisierten Multimedia-Präsentationen bieten bisher weder industrielle Lösungen noch Forschungsansätze. Mit dem Software-technischen Ansatz des MM4U-Frameworks („MultiMedia For You“) wird erstmals eine generische und zugleich praktikable Unterstützung für den dynamischen Erstellungsprozess bereitgestellt. Das Ziel des MM4U-Frameworks ist es den Anwendungsentwicklern eine umfangreiche und anwendungsunabhängige Unterstützung zur Erstellung von personalisierten Multimedia-Inhalten anzubieten und damit den Entwicklungsprozess solcher Anwendungen erheblich zu erleichtern. Um das Ziel eines Software-Frameworks zur generischen Unterstützung der Entwicklung von personalisierten Multimedia-Anwendungen zu erreichen, stellt sich die Frage nach einer geeigneten Software-technischen Unterstützung zur Entwicklung eines solchen Frameworks. Seit der Einführung von objektorientierten Frameworks, ist heute die Entwicklung immer noch aufwendig und schwierig. Um die Entwicklungsrisiken zu reduzieren, sind geeignete Vorgehensmodelle und Entwicklungsmethoden erstellt worden. Mit der Komponenten-Technologie sind auch so genannte Komponenten-Frameworks entstanden. Im Gegensatz zu objekt-orientierten Frameworks fehlt derzeit jedoch ein geeignetes Vorgehensmodell für Komponenten-Frameworks. Um den Entwicklungsprozess von Komponenten-Frameworks zu verbessern ist mit ProMoCF („Process Model for Component Frameworks“) ein neuartiger Ansatz entwickelt worden. Hierbei handelt es sich um ein leichtgewichtiges Vorgehensmodell und eine Entwicklungsmethodik für Komponenten-Frameworks. Das Vorgehensmodell wurde unter gegenseitigem Nutzen mit der Entwicklung des MM4U-Frameworks erstellt. Das MM4U-Framework stellt keine Neuerfindung der Adaption von Multimedia-Inhalten dar, sondern zielt auf die Vereinigung und Einbettung existierender Forschungsansätze und Lösungen im Umfeld der Multimedia-Personalisierung. Mit so einem Framework an der Hand können Anwendungsentwickler erstmals effizient und einfach eine dynamische Erstellung ihrer personalisierten Multimedia-Inhalte realisieren