Advanced visual rendering, gesture-based interaction and distributed delivery for immersive and interactive media services

The media industry is currently being pulled in the often-opposing directions of increased realism (high resolution, stereoscopic, large screen) and personalisation (selection and control of content, availability on many devices). A capture, production, delivery and rendering system capable of supporting both these trends is being developed by a consortium of European organisations including partners from the broadcast, film, telecoms and academic sectors, in the EU-funded FascinatE project. This paper reports on the latest project developments in the delivery network and end-user device domains, including advanced audiovisual rendering, computer analysis and scripting, content-aware distributed delivery and gesture-based interaction. The paper includes an overview of existing immersive media services and concludes with initial service concept descriptions and their market potential.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Toward a content-based watermarking scheme

Image watermarking consists in embedding an unnoticeable and indelible mark inside a digital image. Watermarking technologies aims at solving copyright and integrity problems. Nevertheless classical geometrical transforms generally induce a loss of synchronization that prevent the detection of the mark. We propose in this paper a content-based watermarking scheme that uses a feature point detector to link the mark with the content of the image. In this scheme, feature point detection is followed by a triangular tessellation and the signature is embedded in each triangle of the partition. Our results show that the presented scheme is robust to local geometrical transforms and attacks such as Stirmark.Le tatouage d'images consiste à insérer une signature invisible et indélébile dans une image. Il permet de répondre à des problèmes de droit d'auteur ou d'intégrité. Les transformations géométriques peuvent cependant provoquer une perte de synchronisation et ainsi empêcher la détection de la signature. Nous proposons une méthode de tatouage fondée sur le contenu qui utilise un détecteur de points d'intérêts pour lier la signature au contenu de l'image. La détection de point d'intérêts permet de créer une partition triangulaire et la signature est ensuite insérée dans chacun des triangles. Nos résultats montrent que la méthode présentée est robuste aux déformations géométriques tels que Stirmark

Automatic Morphometry of Nerve Histological Sections

A method for the automatic segmentation, recognition and measurement of neuronal myelinated fibers in nerve histological sections is presented. In this method, the fiber parameters i.e. perimeter, area, position of the fiber and myelin sheath thickness are automatically computed. Obliquity of the sections may be taken into account. First, the image is thresholded to provide a coarse classification between myelin and non-myelin pixels. Next, the resulting binary image is further simplified using connected morphological operators. By applying semantic rules to the zonal graph axon candidates are identified. Those are either isolated or still connected. Then, separation of connected fibers is performed by evaluating myelin sheath thickness around each candidate area with an Euclidean distance transformation. Finally, properties of each detected fiber are computed and false positives are removed. The accuracy of the method is assessed by evaluating missed detection, false positive ratio and comparing the results to the manual procedure with sampling. In the evaluated nerve surface, a 0.9% of false positives was found, along with 6.36% of missed detections. The resulting histograms show strong correlation with those obtained by manual measure. The noise introduced by this method is significantly lower than the intrinsic sampling variability. This automatic method constitutes an original tool for morphometrical analysis

Adherence to self-administered tuberculosis treatment in a high HIV-prevalence setting: a cross-sectional survey in Homa Bay, Kenya.

Good adherence to treatment is crucial to control tuberculosis (TB). Efficiency and feasibility of directly observed therapy (DOT) under routine program conditions have been questioned. As an alternative, Médecins sans Frontières introduced self-administered therapy (SAT) in several TB programs. We aimed to measure adherence to TB treatment among patients receiving TB chemotherapy with fixed dose combination (FDC) under SAT at the Homa Bay district hospital (Kenya). A second objective was to compare the adherence agreement between different assessment tools