Nigerian video-films on history: Love in Vendetta and the 1987 Kano riots

This paper considers a Nigerian video-film from 1996, Love in vendetta, featuring Zack Orji and inspired by the 1987 Kano riots, one of the many incidences of violent outbreaks which opposed Christians to Muslims in the 1980s and resulted in thousands of deaths, injuries and arrests. This Nigerian adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet presents two lovers: an Igbo man and a Hausa girl, who plan their marriage in the midst of strong family opposition on both sides. They eventually discover that their parents' attitude is the result of deep scars left by the 1987 Kano riots and bloodshed. Love eventually prevails, sending a message of hope to the whole country and heralding a time when ethnical and religious differences would be part of the Federation's rich cultural heritage

Video Denoising and Enhancement via Dynamic Video Layering

Video denoising refers to the problem of removing "noise" from a video sequence. Here the term "noise" is used in a broad sense to refer to any corruption or outlier or interference that is not the quantity of interest. In this work, we develop a novel approach to video denoising that is based on the idea that many noisy or corrupted videos can be split into three parts - the "low-rank layer", the "sparse layer", and a small residual (which is small and bounded). We show, using extensive experiments, that our denoising approach outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising algorithms.Comment: Shorter version with title "Video Denoising via Online Sparse and Low-rank Matrix Decomposition" appeared in Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP) 201

The role of structural characteristics in problem video game playing: a review

The structural characteristics of video games may play an important role in explaining why some people play video games to excess. This paper provides a review of the literature on structural features of video games and the psychological experience of playing video games. The dominant view of the appeal of video games is based on operant conditioning theory and the notion that video games satisfy various needs for social interaction and belonging. However, there is a lack of experimental and longitudinal data that assesses the importance of specific features in video games in excessive video game playing. Various challenges in studying the structural features of video games are discussed. Potential directions for future research are outlined, notably the need to identify what problem (as opposed to casual) players seek from the video games they play

Q-AIMD: A Congestion Aware Video Quality Control Mechanism

Following the constant increase of the multimedia traffic, it seems necessary to allow transport protocols to be aware of the video quality of the transmitted flows rather than the throughput. This paper proposes a novel transport mechanism adapted to video flows. Our proposal, called Q-AIMD for video quality AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease), enables fairness in video quality while transmitting multiple video flows. Targeting video quality fairness allows improving the overall video quality for all transmitted flows, especially when the transmitted videos provide various types of content with different spatial resolutions. In addition, Q-AIMD mitigates the occurrence of network congestion events, and dissolves the congestion whenever it occurs by decreasing the video quality and hence the bitrate. Using different video quality metrics, Q-AIMD is evaluated with different video contents and spatial resolutions. Simulation results show that Q-AIMD allows an improved overall video quality among the multiple transmitted video flows compared to a throughput-based congestion control by decreasing significantly the quality discrepancy between them

Video Tester -- A multiple-metric framework for video quality assessment over IP networks

This paper presents an extensible and reusable framework which addresses the problem of video quality assessment over IP networks. The proposed tool (referred to as Video-Tester) supports raw uncompressed video encoding and decoding. It also includes different video over IP transmission methods (i.e.: RTP over UDP unicast and multicast, as well as RTP over TCP). In addition, it is furnished with a rich set of offline analysis capabilities. Video-Tester analysis includes QoS and bitstream parameters estimation (i.e.: bandwidth, packet inter-arrival time, jitter and loss rate, as well as GOP size and I-frame loss rate). Our design facilitates the integration of virtually any existing video quality metric thanks to the adopted Python-based modular approach. Video-Tester currently provides PSNR, SSIM, ITU-T G.1070 video quality metric, DIV and PSNR-based MOS estimations. In order to promote its use and extension, Video-Tester is open and publicly available.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. For the Google Code project, see http://video-tester.googlecode.com