Automatic detection of salient objects and spatial relations in videos for a video database system

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Multimedia databases have gained popularity due to rapidly growing quantities of multimedia data and the need to perform efficient indexing, retrieval and analysis of this data. One downside of multimedia databases is the necessity to process the data for feature extraction and labeling prior to storage and querying. Huge amount of data makes it impossible to complete this task manually. We propose a tool for the automatic detection and tracking of salient objects, and derivation of spatio-temporal relations between them in video. Our system aims to reduce the work for manual selection and labeling of objects significantly by detecting and tracking the salient objects, and hence, requiring to enter the label for each object only once within each shot instead of specifying the labels for each object in every frame they appear. This is also required as a first step in a fully-automatic video database management system in which the labeling should also be done automatically. The proposed framework covers a scalable architecture for video processing and stages of shot boundary detection, salient object detection and tracking, and knowledge-base construction for effective spatio-temporal object querying. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Bilvideo-7: an MPEG-7- compatible video indexing and retrieval system

Cataloged from PDF version of article.BilVideo-7 is an MPEG-7-compatible, distributed, video indexing and retrieval system that supports complex multimodal queries in a unified framework

HandVR: a hand-gesture-based interface to a video retrieval system

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Using one's hands in human-computer interaction increases both the effectiveness of computer usage and the speed of interaction. One way of accomplishing this goal is to utilize computer vision techniques to develop hand-gesture-based interfaces. A video database system is one application where a hand-gesture-based interface is useful, because it provides a way to specify certain queries more easily. We present a hand-gesture-based interface for a video database system to specify motion and spatiotemporal object queries. We use a regular, low-cost camera to monitor the movements and configurations of the user's hands and translate them to video queries. We conducted a user study to compare our gesture-based interface with a mouse-based interface on various types of video queries. The users evaluated the two interfaces in terms of different usability parameters, including the ease of learning, ease of use, ease of remembering (memory), naturalness, comfortable use, satisfaction, and enjoyment. The user study showed that querying video databases is a promising application area for hand-gesture-based interfaces, especially for queries involving motion and spatiotemporal relations. © 2014 Springer-Verlag London

First report of the species Tectoribates ornatus (Acari: Oribatida: Tegoribatidae) from Iran

In the course of our survey on oribatid mite fauna of the orchards of the city of Arak (Markazi Province), in 2005-2006, we identified the species Tectoribates ornatus (Schuster). This species belongs to the family Tegoribatidae and is a new record for the Iranian mite fauna

Report of the second genus and species of oribatid mites of the family Zetomotrichidae (Acari, Oribatida) from Iran

During 2005-2006, in the course of a survey of oribatid mites in Arak region, Markazi province, Zetomotrichus (Zetomotrichus) lacrimans Grandjean, 1934 was collected and identified. This is the second genus and species of the family Zetomotrichidae (Acari, Oribatida) being reported from Iran

Bilkent University Multimedia Database Group at TRECVID 2008

Bilkent University Multimedia Database Group (BILMDG) participated in two tasks at TRECVID 2008: content-based copy detection (CBCD) and high-level feature extraction (FE). Mostly MPEG-7 [1] visual features, which are also used as low-level features in our MPEG-7 compliant video database management system, are extracted for these tasks. This paper discusses our approaches in each task

Early maladaptive schemas and suicidal risk in inpatients with bipolar disorder

The present study aimed to assess the associations of early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) and clinical factors (hypomanic/manic and depressive symptoms) with suicidal risk (current suicidal ideation and lifetime suicide attempts) in inpatients with bipolar disorder (BD). One hundred inpatients with BD completed the Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form (YSQ-SF), the Bipolar Depression Rating Scale (BDRS), the Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS), and the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation (BSSI). 59 of patients had lifetime suicide attempts and 59 showed high suicidal risk (BSSI>/=6). BD patients with lifetime suicide attempts had higher scores on the entitlement and social isolation schemas, depression, and hypomanic/manic symptoms than those without such attempts. Patients with high suicidal risk had higher levels of depressive and hypomanic/manic symptoms as well as some EMSs than those without high suicidal risk. Logistic regression analyses revealed that hypomanic/manic symptoms as well as the entitlement and defectiveness schemas were significantly associated with current suicidal ideation. Also, the entitlement and social isolation schemas were associated with lifetime suicide attempts. These results suggest that the entitlement, social isolation, and defectiveness schemas may relate to suicidal risk in patients with BD

The changing global distribution and prevalence of canine transmissible venereal tumour.

BACKGROUND: The canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT) is a contagious cancer that is naturally transmitted between dogs by the allogeneic transfer of living cancer cells during coitus. CTVT first arose several thousand years ago and has been reported in dog populations worldwide; however, its precise distribution patterns and prevalence remain unclear. RESULTS: We analysed historical literature and obtained CTVT prevalence information from 645 veterinarians and animal health workers in 109 countries in order to estimate CTVT's former and current global distribution and prevalence. This analysis confirmed that CTVT is endemic in at least 90 countries worldwide across all inhabited continents. CTVT is estimated to be present at a prevalence of one percent or more in dogs in at least 13 countries in South and Central America as well as in at least 11 countries in Africa and 8 countries in Asia. In the United States and Australia, CTVT was reported to be endemic only in remote indigenous communities. Comparison of current and historical reports of CTVT indicated that its prevalence has declined in Northern Europe, possibly due to changes in dog control laws during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of factors influencing CTVT prevalence showed that presence of free-roaming dogs was associated with increased CTVT prevalence, while dog spaying and neutering were associated with reduced CTVT prevalence. Our analysis indicated no gender bias for CTVT and we found no evidence that animals with CTVT frequently harbour concurrent infectious diseases. Vincristine was widely reported to be the most effective therapy for CTVT. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide a survey of the current global distribution of CTVT, confirming that CTVT is endemic in at least 90 countries worldwide. Additionally, our analysis highlights factors that continue to modify CTVT's prevalence around the world and implicates free-roaming dogs as a reservoir for the disease. Our analysis also documents the disappearance of the disease from the United Kingdom during the twentieth century, which appears to have been an unintentional result of the introduction of dog control policies.This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final version of this article has been published by BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1746-6148/10/168

Multimedia translation for linking visual data to semantics in videos

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The semantic gap problem, which can be referred to as the disconnection between low-level multimedia data and high-level semantics, is an important obstacle to build real-world multimedia systems. The recently developed methods that can use large volumes of loosely labeled data to provide solutions for automatic image annotation stand as promising approaches toward solving this problem. In this paper, we are interested in how some of these methods can be applied to semantic gap problems that appear in other application domains beyond image annotation. Specifically, we introduce new problems that appear in videos, such as the linking of keyframes with speech transcript text and the linking of faces with names. In a common framework, we formulate these problems as the problem of finding missing correspondences between visual and semantic data and apply the multimedia translation method. We evaluate the performance of the multimedia translation method on these problems and compare its performance against other auto-annotation and classifier-based methods. The experiments, carried out on over 300 h of news videos from TRECVid 2004 and TRECVid 2006 corpora, show that the multimedia translation method provides a performance that is comparable to the other auto-annotation methods and superior performance compared to other classifier-based methods. © 2009 Springer-Verlag