TRECVID: benchmarking the effectiveness of information retrieval tasks on digital video

Many research groups worldwide are now investigating techniques which can support information retrieval on archives of digital video and as groups move on to implement these techniques they inevitably try to evaluate the performance of their techniques in practical situations. The difficulty with doing this is that there is no test collection or any environment in which the effectiveness of video IR or video IR sub-tasks, can be evaluated and compared. The annual series of TREC exercises has, for over a decade, been benchmarking the effectiveness of systems in carrying out various information retrieval tasks on text and audio and has contributed to a huge improvement in many of these. Two years ago, a track was introduced which covers shot boundary detection, feature extraction and searching through archives of digital video. In this paper we present a summary of the activities in the TREC Video track in 2002 where 17 teams from across the world took part

The protection of the unsaturated fatty acids of dried grass and sunflower seed against biohydrogenation by rumen micro-organisms : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Agricultural Science in Animal Science at Massey University

Ryegrass which had been dried and treated with HCHO was incubated with the rumen contents of a pasture-grazed cow. The protein in the grass was protected from degradation by the rumen microbes. The degree of protection of the protein increased with the rate of HCHO application over the range 0.5-2.0 g HCHO per 100 g of dried grass. At the highest rate of HCHO application, the digestibility of the forage dry matter (measured in vitro) was a little less than that of the untreated forage. In vitro incubations with rumen fluid also showed substantial protection of 18:3 in dried grass which had been treated with HCHO. Again, the degree of protection increased with the rate of application of HCHO. The upper level of HCHO treatment which was also the optimum was higher than the level recommended by other workers for the protection of protein in dried forage. Dried grass obtained from a commercial source was treated with HCHO (2 g HCHO/lOO g dried grass) and was fed to a cow from a monozygous twin pair. Intake was reduced and an underfeeding response was observed. The proportions of 18:2 and 18:3 in the milk fat of the cow were not elevated. This lack of response probably was due to a combination of the depressed intake by the cow and the low levels of endogenous lipid (compared with spring pasture) in the grass used. A supplement of sunflower seed and casein which had been treated with HCHO was fed to a cow. Milk fat containing about 10 moles % 18:2 was produced. When a supplement of sunflower seed and casein which had not been treated with HCHO was fed, a much smaller increase in the content of 18:2 in the milk fat was observed

The Físchlár digital library: networked access to a video archive of TV news

This paper presents an overview of the Físchlár digital library, a collection of over 300 hours of broadcast TV content which has been indexed to allow searching, browsing and playback of video. The system is in daily use by over 1,500 users on our University campus and is used for teaching and learning, for research, and for entertainment. It is shortly to be made available to University libraries elsewhere in Ireland. The infrastructure we use is a Gigabit ETHERNET backbone and a conventional web browser for searching and browsing video content, with a browser plug-in for streaming video. As well as providing an overview of the system, the paper concentrates on the complimentary navigation techniques of browsing and searching which are supported within Físchlár

An outdoor spatially-aware audio playback platform exemplified by a virtual zoo

Outlined in this short paper is a framework for the construction of outdoor location-and direction-aware audio applications along with an example application to showcase the strengths of the framework and to demonstrate how it works. Although there has been previous work in this area which has concentrated on the spatial presentation of sound through wireless headphones, typically such sounds are presented as though originating from specific, defined spatial locations within a 3D environment. Allowing a user to move freely within this space and adjusting the sound dynamically as we do here, further enhances the perceived reality of the virtual environment. Techniques to realise this are implemented by the real-time adjustment of the presented 2 channels of audio to the headphones, using readings of the user's head orientation and location which in turn are made possible by sensors mounted upon the headphones. Aside from proof of concept indoor applications, more user-responsive applications of spatial audio delivery have not been prototyped or explored. In this paper we present an audio-spatial presentation platform along with a primary demonstration application for an outdoor environment which we call a {\em virtual audio zoo}. This application explores our techniques to further improve the realism of the audio-spatial environments we can create, and to assess what types of future application are possible

Clustering-based analysis of semantic concept models for video shots

In this paper we present a clustering-based method for representing semantic concepts on multimodal low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the goodness of such models with entropy-based methods. As different semantic concepts in video are most accurately represented with different features and modalities, we utilize the relative model-wise confidence values of the feature extraction techniques in weighting them automatically. The method also provides a natural way of measuring the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia lexicon. The experiments of the paper are conducted using the development set of the TRECVID 2005 corpus together with a common annotation for 39 semantic concept

An evaluation of the role of sentiment in second screen microblog search tasks

The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for information retrieval and web data mining research. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user's query at a point in time, automated methods are required to sift through this information. Sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling microblog content. We build and evaluate a sentiment-based filtering system using real-time user studies. We find a significant role played by sentiment in the search scenarios, observing detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users' prior topic sentiment

Crowdsourced real-world sensing: sentiment analysis and the real-time web

The advent of the real-time web is proving both challeng- ing and at the same time disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis oers a promising direction for modelling the text content available in real-time streams. This paper reviews the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis and discusses the motivations and challenges behind such a direction