23,654 research outputs found
Automated speech and audio analysis for semantic access to multimedia
The deployment and integration of audio processing tools can enhance the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of conceptual access tools. This paper overviews the various ways in which automatic speech and audio analysis can contribute to increased granularity of automatically extracted metadata. A number of techniques will be presented, including the alignment of speech and text resources, large vocabulary speech recognition, key word spotting and speaker classification. The applicability of techniques will be discussed from a media crossing perspective. The added value of the techniques and their potential contribution to the content value chain will be illustrated by the description of two (complementary) demonstrators for browsing broadcast news archives
Video summarisation: A conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art
This is the post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the article. Copyright @ 2007 Elsevier Inc.Video summaries provide condensed and succinct representations of the content of a video stream through a combination of still images, video segments, graphical representations and textual descriptors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video summarisation derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature. The framework distinguishes between video summarisation techniques (the methods used to process content from a source video stream to achieve a summarisation of that stream) and video summaries (outputs of video summarisation techniques). Video summarisation techniques are considered within three broad categories: internal (analyse information sourced directly from the video stream), external (analyse information not sourced directly from the video stream) and hybrid (analyse a combination of internal and external information). Video summaries are considered as a function of the type of content they are derived from (object, event, perception or feature based) and the functionality offered to the user for their consumption (interactive or static, personalised or generic). It is argued that video summarisation would benefit from greater incorporation of external information, particularly user based information that is unobtrusively sourced, in order to overcome longstanding challenges such as the semantic gap and providing video summaries that have greater relevance to individual users
An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management
In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions
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Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation
This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application
During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal
Multi modal multi-semantic image retrieval
PhDThe rapid growth in the volume of visual information, e.g. image, and video can
overwhelm users’ ability to find and access the specific visual information of interest
to them. In recent years, ontology knowledge-based (KB) image information retrieval
techniques have been adopted into in order to attempt to extract knowledge from these
images, enhancing the retrieval performance. A KB framework is presented to
promote semi-automatic annotation and semantic image retrieval using multimodal
cues (visual features and text captions). In addition, a hierarchical structure for the KB
allows metadata to be shared that supports multi-semantics (polysemy) for concepts.
The framework builds up an effective knowledge base pertaining to a domain specific
image collection, e.g. sports, and is able to disambiguate and assign high level
semantics to ‘unannotated’ images.
Local feature analysis of visual content, namely using Scale Invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) descriptors, have been deployed in the ‘Bag of Visual Words’
model (BVW) as an effective method to represent visual content information and to
enhance its classification and retrieval. Local features are more useful than global
features, e.g. colour, shape or texture, as they are invariant to image scale, orientation
and camera angle. An innovative approach is proposed for the representation,
annotation and retrieval of visual content using a hybrid technique based upon the use
of an unstructured visual word and upon a (structured) hierarchical ontology KB
model. The structural model facilitates the disambiguation of unstructured visual
words and a more effective classification of visual content, compared to a vector
space model, through exploiting local conceptual structures and their relationships.
The key contributions of this framework in using local features for image
representation include: first, a method to generate visual words using the semantic
local adaptive clustering (SLAC) algorithm which takes term weight and spatial
locations of keypoints into account. Consequently, the semantic information is
preserved. Second a technique is used to detect the domain specific ‘non-informative
visual words’ which are ineffective at representing the content of visual data and
degrade its categorisation ability. Third, a method to combine an ontology model with
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a visual word model to resolve synonym (visual heterogeneity) and polysemy
problems, is proposed. The experimental results show that this approach can discover
semantically meaningful visual content descriptions and recognise specific events,
e.g., sports events, depicted in images efficiently.
Since discovering the semantics of an image is an extremely challenging problem, one
promising approach to enhance visual content interpretation is to use any associated
textual information that accompanies an image, as a cue to predict the meaning of an
image, by transforming this textual information into a structured annotation for an
image e.g. using XML, RDF, OWL or MPEG-7. Although, text and image are distinct
types of information representation and modality, there are some strong, invariant,
implicit, connections between images and any accompanying text information.
Semantic analysis of image captions can be used by image retrieval systems to
retrieve selected images more precisely. To do this, a Natural Language Processing
(NLP) is exploited firstly in order to extract concepts from image captions. Next, an
ontology-based knowledge model is deployed in order to resolve natural language
ambiguities. To deal with the accompanying text information, two methods to extract
knowledge from textual information have been proposed. First, metadata can be
extracted automatically from text captions and restructured with respect to a semantic
model. Second, the use of LSI in relation to a domain-specific ontology-based
knowledge model enables the combined framework to tolerate ambiguities and
variations (incompleteness) of metadata. The use of the ontology-based knowledge
model allows the system to find indirectly relevant concepts in image captions and
thus leverage these to represent the semantics of images at a higher level.
Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances image
retrieval and leads to narrowing of the semantic gap between lower level machinederived
and higher level human-understandable conceptualisation
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