A Web video retrieval method using hierarchical structure of Web video groups

In this paper, we propose a Web video retrieval method that uses hierarchical structure of Web video groups. Existing retrieval systems require users to input suitable queries that identify the desired contents in order to accurately retrieve Web videos; however, the proposed method enables retrieval of the desired Web videos even if users cannot input the suitable queries. Specifically, we first select representative Web videos from a target video dataset by using link relationships between Web videos obtained via metadata “related videos” and heterogeneous video features. Furthermore, by using the representative Web videos, we construct a network whose nodes and edges respectively correspond to Web videos and links between these Web videos. Then Web video groups, i.e., Web video sets with similar topics are hierarchically extracted based on strongly connected components, edge betweenness and modularity. By exhibiting the obtained hierarchical structure of Web video groups, users can easily grasp the overview of many Web videos. Consequently, even if users cannot write suitable queries that identify the desired contents, it becomes feasible to accurately retrieve the desired Web videos by selecting Web video groups according to the hierarchical structure. Experimental results on actual Web videos verify the effectiveness of our method

Auto-models with mixed states and analysis of motion textures

In image motion analysis as well as for several application fields like daily pluviometry data modeling, observations contain two components of different nature. A first part is made with discrete values accounting for some symbolic information and a second part records a continuous (real-valued) measurement. We call such type of observations ``mixed-state observations". In this work we introduce a generalization of Besag's auto-models to deal with mixed-state observations at each site of a lattice. A careful construction as well as important properties of the model will be given. The performance of the model is then evaluated on the modeling of motion textures from video sequences

Extraction of activity patterns on large video recordings

International audienceExtracting the hidden and useful knowledge embedded within video sequences and thereby discovering relations between the various elements to help an efficient decision-making process is a challenging task. The task of knowledge discovery and information analysis is possible because of recent advancements in object detection and tracking. The authors present how video information is processed with the ultimate aim to achieve knowledge discovery of people activity and also extract the relationship between the people and contextual objects in the scene. First, the object of interest and its semantic characteristics are derived in real-time. The semantic information related to the objects is represented in a suitable format for knowledge discovery. Next, two clustering processes are applied to derive the knowledge from the video data. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering is used to find the main trajectory patterns of people and relational analysis clustering is employed to extract the relationship between people, contextual objects and events. Finally, the authors evaluate the proposed activity extraction model using real video sequences from underground metro networks (CARETAKER) and a building hall (CAVIAR)

Semantic concept detection from visual content with statistical learning

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling

Much of our cultural discourse occurs primarily on the Web. Thus, Web preservation is a fundamental precondition for multiple disciplines. Archiving Web pages into themed collections is a method for ensuring these resources are available for posterity. Services such as Archive-It exists to allow institutions to develop, curate, and preserve collections of Web resources. Understanding the contents and boundaries of these archived collections is a challenge for most people, resulting in the paradox of the larger the collection, the harder it is to understand. Meanwhile, as the sheer volume of data grows on the Web, storytelling is becoming a popular technique in social media for selecting Web resources to support a particular narrative or story . In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding the archived collections through proposing the Dark and Stormy Archive (DSA) framework, in which we integrate storytelling social media and Web archives. In the DSA framework, we identify, evaluate, and select candidate Web pages from archived collections that summarize the holdings of these collections, arrange them in chronological order, and then visualize these pages using tools that users already are familiar with, such as Storify. To inform our work of generating stories from archived collections, we start by building a baseline for the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories through investigating stories from Storify. Furthermore, we checked the entire population of Archive-It collections for better understanding the characteristics of the collections we intend to summarize. We then filter off-topic pages from the collections the using different methods to detect when an archived page in a collection has gone off-topic. We created a gold standard dataset from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. From the gold standard dataset, we identified five behaviors for the TimeMaps (a list of archived copies of a page) based on the page’s aboutness. Based on a dynamic slicing algorithm, we divide the collection and cluster the pages in each slice. We then select the best representative page from each cluster based on different quality metrics (e.g., the replay quality, and the quality of the generated snippet from the page). At the end, we put the selected pages in chronological order and visualize them using Storify. For evaluating the DSA framework, we obtained a ground truth dataset of hand-crafted stories from Archive-It collections generated by expert archivists. We used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to evaluate the automatically generated stories against the stories that were created by domain experts. The results show that the automatically generated stories by the DSA are indistinguishable from those created by human subject domain experts, while at the same time both kinds of stories (automatic and human) are easily distinguished from randomly generated storie

An effective trajectory-based algorithm for ball detection and tracking with application to the analysis of broadcast sports video

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH