43,103 research outputs found
CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version
The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action).
This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events.
The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search.
A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009
CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines
Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective.
The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines.
From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research
PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones
As smartphones become more pervasive, they are increasingly targeted by
malware. At the same time, each new generation of smartphone features
increasingly powerful onboard sensor suites. A new strain of sensor malware has
been developing that leverages these sensors to steal information from the
physical environment (e.g., researchers have recently demonstrated how malware
can listen for spoken credit card numbers through the microphone, or feel
keystroke vibrations using the accelerometer). Yet the possibilities of what
malware can see through a camera have been understudied. This paper introduces
a novel visual malware called PlaceRaider, which allows remote attackers to
engage in remote reconnaissance and what we call virtual theft. Through
completely opportunistic use of the camera on the phone and other sensors,
PlaceRaider constructs rich, three dimensional models of indoor environments.
Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment
carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment (such as financial
documents, information on computer monitors, and personally identifiable
information). Through two human subject studies we demonstrate the
effectiveness of using mobile devices as powerful surveillance and virtual
theft platforms, and we suggest several possible defenses against visual
malware
Towards energy-autonomous wake-up receiver using visible light communication
The use of Visible Light Communication (VLC) in wake-up communication systems is a potential energy-efficient and low-cost solution for wireless communication of consumer electronics. In this paper, we go one step further and propose the use of visible light both for wake-up communication and energy harvesting purposes, with the final objective of an energy-autonomous wake-up receiver module. We first present the details and the design criteria of this novel system. We then present the results of evaluation of design criteria such as solar panel and capacitor type choices. To evaluate the performance of the developed wake-up system with energy-autonomous receiver system, we perform realistic indoor scenario tests, analyzing the effect of varying distances, angles, and light intensities as well as the effect of presence of interfering lights.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Images for change: community development, community arts and photography
This article explores how community development objectives can be achieved through critical photographic practice. It summarizes the literature relating to community arts practice and its potential for social regeneration. Photography is then located within this context and explored as a critical practice, with particular attention being given to photo-elicitation, photo-novella and photovoice methods. The literature is discussed and analysed to explore how far critical photographic practice can meet the objectives of community development
WESPE: Weakly Supervised Photo Enhancer for Digital Cameras
Low-end and compact mobile cameras demonstrate limited photo quality mainly
due to space, hardware and budget constraints. In this work, we propose a deep
learning solution that translates photos taken by cameras with limited
capabilities into DSLR-quality photos automatically. We tackle this problem by
introducing a weakly supervised photo enhancer (WESPE) - a novel image-to-image
Generative Adversarial Network-based architecture. The proposed model is
trained by under weak supervision: unlike previous works, there is no need for
strong supervision in the form of a large annotated dataset of aligned
original/enhanced photo pairs. The sole requirement is two distinct datasets:
one from the source camera, and one composed of arbitrary high-quality images
that can be generally crawled from the Internet - the visual content they
exhibit may be unrelated. Hence, our solution is repeatable for any camera:
collecting the data and training can be achieved in a couple of hours. In this
work, we emphasize on extensive evaluation of obtained results. Besides
standard objective metrics and subjective user study, we train a virtual rater
in the form of a separate CNN that mimics human raters on Flickr data and use
this network to get reference scores for both original and enhanced photos. Our
experiments on the DPED, KITTI and Cityscapes datasets as well as pictures from
several generations of smartphones demonstrate that WESPE produces comparable
or improved qualitative results with state-of-the-art strongly supervised
methods
Designing Free Sofware for Marketing: A Game Theoretic Approach
We develop a vertical differentiation game-theoretic model that addresses the issue of designing free software samples for attaining follow-on sales. When software samples are akin to durable goods, a Monopolist giving a free sample away is likely to engender the cannibalization of sales of its commercial product. We analyze the optimal design of free software according to two characteristics: the trial time allotted for sampling (potentially renewable) and the proportion of features included in the sample. We find that these two dimensions play different roles whenever the software product is innovative or standard. We draw implications regarding the effectiveness of marketing strategies depending on the type of software product offered by a Monopolist.Vertical Differentiation, Monopolist, Free sample, Software, Durable goods, Sales Cannibalization, Optimal Design.
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