7 research outputs found
Integrated analysis of audiovisual signals and external information sources for event detection in team sports video
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Sound based social networks
The sound environment is an eco of the activity and character of each
place, often carrying additional information to that made available to the eyes
(both new and redundant). It is, therefore, an intangible and volatile acoustic
fingerprint of the place, or simply an acoustic snapshot of a single event. Such
rich resource, full of meaning and subtleness, Schaeffer called Soundscape.
The exploratory research project presented here addresses the Soundscape
in the context of Mobile Online Social Networking, aiming at determining the
extent of its applicability regarding the establishment and/or strengthening of
new and existing social links. Such research goal demanded an interdisciplinary
approach, which we have anchored in three main stems: Soundscapes,
Mobile Sound and Social Networking. These three areas pave the scientific
ground for this study and are introduced during the first part of the thesis. An
extensive survey of the state-of-the-arte projects related with this research is
also presented, gathering examples from different but adjacent areas such as
mobile sensing, wearable computing, sonification, social media and contextaware
computing. This survey validates that our approach is scientifically opportune
and unique, at the same time.
Furthermore, in order to assess the role of Soundscapes in the context
of Social Networking, an experimental procedure has been implemented
based on an Online Social Networking mobile application, enriched with environmental
sensing mechanisms, able to capture and analyze the surrounding
Soundscape and users' movements. Two main goals guided this prototypal
research tool: collecting data regarding users' activity (both sonic and kinetic)
and providing users with a real experience using a Sound-Based Social Network,
in order to collect informed opinions about this unique type of Social
Networking. The application – Hurly-Burly – senses the surrounding Soundscape
and analyzes it using machine audition techniques, classifying it according
to four categories: speech, music, environmental sounds and silence. Additionally, it determines the sound pressure level of the sensed Soundscape
in dB(A)eq. This information is then broadcasted to the entire online social
network of the user, allowing each element to visualize and audition a representation
of the collected data. An individual record for each user is kept
available in a webserver and can be accessed through an online application,
displaying the continuous acoustic profile of each user along a timeline graph.
The experimental procedure included three different test groups, forming each
one a social network with a cluster coefficient equal to one.
After the implementation and result analysis stages we concluded that
Soundscapes can have a role in the Online Social Networking paradigm, specially
when concerning mobile applications. Has been proven that current offthe-
shelf mobile technology is a promising opportunity for accomplishing this
kind of tasks (such as continuous monitoring, life logging and environment
sensing) but battery limitations and multitasking's constraints are still the bottleneck,
hindering the massification of successful applications. Additionally,
online privacy is something that users are not enthusiastic in letting go: using
captured sound instead of representations of the sound would abstain users
from utilizing such applications. We also demonstrated that users who are
more aware of the Soundscape concept are also more inclined to assume it
as playing an important role in OSN. This means that more pedagogy towards
the acoustic phenomenon is needed and this type of research gives a step
further in that direction.O ambiente sonoro de um lugar é um eco da sua atividade e carácter,
transportando, na maior parte da vezes, informação adicional àquela que é
proporcionada à visão (quer seja redundante ou complementar). É, portanto,
uma impressão digital acústica - tangível e volátil - do lugar a que pertence,
ou simplesmente uma fotografia acústica de um evento pontual. A este opulento
recurso, carregado de significados e subtilezas, Schafer chamou de
Paisagem-Sonora. O projeto de investigação de carácter exploratório que
aqui apresentamos visa o estudo da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes
Sociais Móveis Em-Linha, procurando entender os moldes e limites da
sua aplicação, tendo em vista o estabelecimento e/ou reforço de novos ou
existente laços sociais, respectivamente. Para satisfazer este objectivo foi
necessária uma abordagem multidisciplinar, ancorada em três pilares principais:
a Paisagem-Sonora, o Som Móvel e as Redes Sociais. Estas três áreas
determinaram a moldura científica de referência em que se enquadrou esta
investigação, sendo explanadas na primeira parte da tese. Um extenso levantamento
do estado-da-arte referente a projetos relacionados com este estudo
é também apresentado, compilando exemplos de áreas distintas mas adjacentes,
tais como: Computação Sensorial Móvel, Computação Vestível, Sonificação,
Média Social e Computação Contexto-Dependente. Este levantamento
veio confirmar quer a originalidade quer a pertinência científica do projeto
apresentado.
Posteriormente, a fim de avaliar o papel da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto
das Redes Sociais, foi posto em prática um procedimento experimental
baseado numa Rede Social Sonora Em-Linha, desenvolvida de raiz para dispositivos
móveis e acrescida de mecanismos sensoriais para estímulos ambientais,
capazes de analisar a Paisagem-Sonora envolvente e os movimentos
do utilizador. Dois objectivos principais guiaram a produção desta ferramenta
de investigação: recolher dados relativos à atividade cinética e sonora dos utilizadores e proporcionar a estes uma experiência real de utilização
uma Rede Social Sonora, de modo a recolher opiniões fundamentadas sobre
esta tipologia específica de socialização. A aplicação – Hurly-Burly – analisa
a Paisagem-Sonora através de algoritmos de Audição Computacional, classificando-
a de acordo com quatro categorias: diálogo (voz), música, sons ambientais
(“ruídos”) e silêncio. Adicionalmente, determina o seu nível de pressão
sonora em dB(A)eq. Esta informação é então distribuída pela rede social
dos utilizadores, permitindo a cada elemento visualizar e ouvir uma representação
do som analisado. É mantido num servidor Web um registo individual
da informação sonora e cinética captada, o qual pode ser acedido através de
uma aplicação Web que mostra o perfil sonoro de cada utilizador ao longo do
tempo, numa visualização ao estilo linha-temporal. O procedimento experimental
incluiu três grupos de teste distintos, formando cada um a sua própria
rede social com coeficiente de aglomeração igual a um. Após a implementação
da experiência e análise de resultados, concluímos que a Paisagem-
Sonora pode desempenhar um papel no paradigma das Redes Sociais Em-
Linha, em particular no que diz respeito à sua presença nos dispositivos móveis.
Ficou provado que os dispositivos móveis comerciais da atualidade
apresentam-se com uma oportunidade promissora para desempenhar este
tipo de tarefas (tais como: monitorização contínua, registo quotidiano e análise
sensorial ambiental), mas as limitações relacionadas com a autonomia
energética e funcionamento em multitarefa representam ainda um constrangimento
que impede a sua massificação. Além disso, a privacidade no mundo
virtual é algo que os utilizadores atuais não estão dispostos a abdicar: partilhar
continuamente a Paisagem-Sonora real em detrimento de uma representação
de alto nível é algo que refrearia os utilizadores de usar a aplicação.
Também demonstrámos que os utilizadores que mais conhecedores do fenómeno
da Paisagem-Sonora são também os que consideram esta como importante
no contexto das Redes Sociais Em-Linha. Isso significa que uma atitude
pedagógica em relação ao fenómeno sonoro é essencial para obter dele
o maior ganho possível. Esta investigação propõe-se a dar um passo em
frente nessa direção
Development of a text reading system on video images
Since the early days of computer science researchers sought to devise a machine which could automatically read text to help people with visual impairments. The problem of extracting and recognising text on document images has been largely resolved, but reading text from images of natural scenes remains a challenge. Scene text can present uneven lighting, complex backgrounds or perspective and lens distortion; it usually appears as short sentences or isolated words and shows a very diverse set of typefaces. However, video sequences of natural scenes provide a temporal redundancy that can be exploited to compensate for some of these deficiencies. Here we present a complete end-to-end, real-time scene text reading system on video images based on perspective aware text tracking.
The main contribution of this work is a system that automatically detects, recognises and tracks text in videos of natural scenes in real-time. The focus of our method is on large text found in outdoor environments, such as shop signs, street names and billboards. We introduce novel efficient techniques for text detection, text aggregation and text perspective estimation. Furthermore, we propose using a set of Unscented Kalman Filters (UKF) to maintain each text region¿s identity and to continuously track the homography transformation of the text into a fronto-parallel view, thereby being resilient to erratic camera motion and wide baseline changes in orientation. The orientation of each text line is estimated using a method that relies on the geometry of the characters themselves to estimate a rectifying homography. This is done irrespective of the view of the text over a large range of orientations. We also demonstrate a wearable head-mounted device for text reading that encases a camera for image acquisition and a pair of headphones for synthesized speech output.
Our system is designed for continuous and unsupervised operation over long periods of time. It is completely automatic and features quick failure recovery and interactive text reading. It is also highly parallelised in order to maximize the usage of available processing power and to achieve real-time operation. We show comparative results that improve the current state-of-the-art when correcting perspective deformation of scene text. The end-to-end system performance is demonstrated on sequences recorded in outdoor scenarios. Finally, we also release a dataset of text tracking videos along with the annotated ground-truth of text regions
Air Traffic Management Abbreviation Compendium
As in all fields of work, an unmanageable number of abbreviations are used today in aviation for terms, definitions, commands, standards and technical descriptions. This applies in general to the areas of aeronautical communication, navigation and surveillance, cockpit and air traffic control working positions, passenger and cargo transport, and all other areas of flight planning, organization and guidance. In addition, many abbreviations are used more than once or have different meanings in different languages.
In order to obtain an overview of the most common abbreviations used in air traffic management, organizations like EUROCONTROL, FAA, DWD and DLR have published lists of abbreviations in the past, which have also been enclosed in this document. In addition, abbreviations from some larger international projects related to aviation have been included to provide users with a directory as complete as possible. This means that the second edition of the Air Traffic Management Abbreviation Compendium includes now around 16,500 abbreviations and acronyms from the field of aviation
The Media in the Network Society: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship
560 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.Libro ElectrónicoIn the Network Society the development of a new communicational model has been taking shape. A communicational model characterized by the fusion of interpersonal communication and mass communication, connecting audiences
and broadcasters under a hypertextual matrix linking several media devices. The Networked Communication model is the informational societies communication model. A model that must be understood also in its needed literacies for building our media diets, media matrixes and on how it’s changing the way autonomy is managed and citizenship exercised in the Information Age. In this book Gustavo Cardoso develops an analysis that, focusing on the last decade, takes us from Europe to North America and from South America to Asia, combining under the framework of the Network Society a broad range of scientific perspectives from Media Studies to Political Science and Social
Movements theory to Sociology of Communication.Index of Figures
Index of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
The Media in the Network Society. Contextualizing the Media in the Network Society; Media, Autonomy and Citizenship
1. The Multiple Dimensions of the Network Society. The Network Society; The Culture of the Informational Societies
2. Societies in Transition to the Network Society. Societies in Transition in the Global Network; Societies in Transitions, Values and Social Well-Being; Media and Social Change in the Network Societies
3. From Mass to Networked Communication: Communicational Models and the Informational Society Communicational Models and the Informational Society. Communicational Globalization in the 20th Century; Mass Media and New Media: the Articulation of a New Communicational Model?; Rhetoric, Accessibility of Information and Narratives Networked Communication
4. A Constellation of Networks: Mass Media, Games, Internet and Telephones. An Entertainment Meta-System in Transition: from Multimedia Games to Television; The New Entertainment Player: Multimedia Games; The Reaffirmation of TV as a Central Element of the Entertainment Meta-System; From Interactive Television to Networked Television
5. Has the Internet Really Changed the Mass Media?. From the End of Journalism to Its Reconstruction; The Information Meta-System and Its Network Organization; Television: the New Online Functions; From Radio Interactivity to Newspaper; Time Management: the Media Network
6. The Massification of the Internet Experience. The New Frontiers and Their Entry Portals; Media, Memory and Filters
7. Media and Citizenship in the Network Society. Mediation of Citizenship and Informational Literacy; The Different Media Ages; Different Media Ages, Different Forms of Citizenship?
8. Mediated Politics: Citizens and Political Parties in Continuous Democracy; An Institutional and Parliamentary; Framework for Continuous Democracy; The Internet as Hostage of Institutional Informational Politics?
9. Media, Mobilization and Protests. Goku vs. The Ministry of Culture: Terràvista, Television and Newspapers; The Closure of RTP2: Television Seen from the Internet; The Pro-East Timor Movement: Human Rights, Mass Media and the Internet; Instrumentalization of the Networked Symbolic Mediation
Conclusion: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship.Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship
Bibliograph
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