Cognitive computing for intelligent multimedia systems

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

Classification algorithms for interactive multimedia services: a review

Interactive multimedia services, which integrate and unify techniques from a variety of disciplines, have been an active research topic for many years. However, two major challenges need to be overcome to provide a better service: The first is that interactive multimedia systems have to provide the contents a user needs at the right time no matter where the user is located and what device the user is using; the second is that the performance of such systems needs to be improved. Apparently, classification and clustering (also called unsupervised classification) algorithms play an indispensable role in these respects. Thus, this paper contains a review of the classification algorithms for interactive multimedia systems. Also discussed in this paper are several important issues, open questions, and trends.     

Advances in interactive digital multimedia systems

This paper introduces basic concepts in digital multimedia systems and surveys recent literature. Background is provided regarding developments in interactive videodiscs, which first made images and video accessible through computer systems. Digital storage media, including optical, magnetic, and network options, are addressed. The characteristics of audio and video and their digital representations are discussed. Because these media are so demanding of space and channel bandwidth, compression methods are reviewed. Standards for digital multimedia are considered. Current multimedia systems are described, and future prospects are indicated     

Soft computing techniques and applications for intelligent multimedia systems

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

ViMediaNet: an emulation system for interactive multimedia based telepresence services

The telepresence service (TPS) leverages advanced communication, virtual reality, and cooperative web technologies to provide remote engaged users an immersive experience of being fully present, which are widely used in teleconferencing, remote surgery, and hazardous environment exploration. The common feature of TPS-based applications lies in that the users’ experiences heavily depend on the quality of interactive multimedia services, that is, most deliveries of multimedia contents are mission-critical, as well as time-critical, to ensure the control and operation accuracy for telerobots. Therefore, the delivery performance of multimedia contents over heterogeneous networks becomes the primary concern in the TPS system design, especially for those delay sensitive applications, like remote surgery and environment exploration. In this paper, we incorporate video processing tools with the network simulator to design and implement a joint emulation system, named as the virtual media network (ViMediaNet), through which, the TPS designer can readily deploy the TPS system over a heterogeneous network virtualized by the network emulator, investigate the critical network performance metrics in the multimedia content delivery, such as transmission delay and packet jitter, and observe control results in real time. To verify the capability of ViMediaNet in emulating the real-setting TPS system, we take a mobile device based vision navigation system as an example to evaluate performance impacts of the rate adaptation technology in the telerobot control. The experimental results reveal that the adaptive video streaming is a promising solution to significantly enhance the control accuracy of telerobots in TPS systems.     

Large-scale multimedia content delivery over optical networks for interactive TV services

iTVP is a system built for delivery of live TV programming, video-on-demand and audio-on-demand with interactive access over IP networks. It has a nationwide range and is designed to provide service to a high number of concurrent users. Hence, scalability is one of the most important issues. In this paper we described how scalability is achieved in a two-level hierarchical architecture of the delivery system. We present the principles of content caching mechanisms and the management of the resulting distributed content repository. The system is implemented and currently operates in a test installation. Although the range of the test system operations is limited, as far as the number of users and the size of the content repository is concerned, the experience gained with iTVP so far provides an insight into the expected prototype performance. We present a system performance evaluation and describe the experience gained during the iGrid demonstration.     

A standard reference model for intelligent multimedia presentation systems

This article summarizes the main results of a joint endeavor towards a standard reference model (SRM) for intelligent multimedia presentation systems (IMMPSs). After a brief motivation, we give basic definitions for media terms and presentation systems. The core of this contribution is a generic reference architecture that reflects an implementation-independent view of the processes required for the generation of multimedia presentations. The reference architecture is described in terms of layers, components, and knowledge servers. Our SRM focuses on the functions assigned to the layers and components, rather than on the methods or communication protocols that may be employed to realize this functionality. Finally, we point to some possible extensions of the reference model.     

Cybersecurity,intelligent multimedia systems for threat detection and data protection

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

U-HMS: hybrid system for secure intelligent multimedia data services in Ubi-Home

Requirements for are rapidly increasing, such as multimedia services, automatic execution of intelligent services without manual commands from user, user-friendliness, transparency of use, and interoperability of multimedia data among incompatible devices. In addition, in order to provide secure multimedia data services, multimedia data protection and management, authentication, and authorization management methods that fit the purpose of the above demands are expected to be required. In this paper, ubiquitous-hybrid multimedia system for secure and intelligent multimedia data services in Ubi-Home is proposed. In addition, an authentication method suitable for the Ubi-Home is suggested. The proposed system provides intelligent services by reflecting context information (user preference, user location, device status information) through sensor network modules, providing transparent and secure multimedia service.     

Communities on the road: fast triggering of interactive multimedia services

Social network communities are involving millions of users, representing one of the main reasons why people log on the Internet from their home computers. Part of this success is certainly due to the possibility for end users to reverse the traditional publisher/consumer model, achieving control over service consumption, and gaining the opportunity to produce multimedia contents instantaneously available worldwide. Social network communities are not destined to be confined in traditional wired networks. Indeed, mobile users could greatly benefit from applications that combine social networks and location-based multimedia services. It is hence of particular interest to consider the next frontier in wireless networking, i.e., vehicular networks, and imagine how community-based services could be provided in this highly variable context, enabling the sprouting of communities on the road. To this aim, we address here one of the specific challenges in this scenario, i.e., the fast delivery of service triggering messages generated by a user to a certain area where another user can provide the requested multimedia service (e.g., live video streaming, traffic updates, friends finder, status messages of social network applications). We discuss the state-of-art for this technical challenge and compare it against our solution, which is able to dynamically adapt to different transmission conditions as those featuring a vehicular network. In essence, the main innovation of our contribution amounts to a transmission range estimator that enables vehicles to know their current transmission range, independently from changes in the vehicular network topology, and use it to maximize the efficiency in transmitting service-triggering messages.

Decimation of human face model for real-time animation in intelligent multimedia systems

Animating a complex human face model in real-time is not a trivial task in intelligent multimedia systems for next generation environments. This paper proposes a generation scheme of a simplified model for real-time human face animation in intelligent multimedia systems. Previous work mainly focused on the geometric features when generating a simplified human face model. Such methods may lose the critical feature points for animating human faces. The proposed method can find those important feature points and can generate the feature-preserved low-level models busing our new quadrics. The new quadrics consist of basic error metrics and feature edge quadrics. The quality of facial animation with a lower-level model is as good as that of a computationally expansive original model. In this paper, we prove that our decimated facial model is effective in facial animation using a well-known expression-retargeting technique.     

Foot-turistic multimedia: designing interactive multimedia installations for shoe shops

The amount of money spent in a store is positively correlated with the amount of time spent inside. We argue this is an opportunity for multimedia installations that can entertain shoppers and promote interaction with the shop??s products. This was the main principle behind our design idea for two interactive installations specifically conceived for shoe shops. We present two applications of interactive multimedia to shoe shopping: an interactive semantic mirror and an interactive window logo. We also describe the results of ethnographic studies, before and after the design process. Our contribution is two-fold: (i) we develop and apply a new multimedia architecture that combines RFID in-store technology with high-end motion detection algorithms, and (ii) we describe one of the first few studies about multimedia installations for improving the shoe shopping experience, in what we call ??foot-turistic?? interactions.     

RFID-based interactive multimedia system for the children

In this paper, we present an interactive edutainment system for the children that leverages multimedia and RFID technologies in a seamless manner. The proposed system allows children to learn about new objects/entities by tapping on physical objects through a specially designed RFID-Bluetooth based Tangible User Interface (TUI) tool. The output of the system is delivered as a set of appropriate multimedia representations related to the objects being tapped. The TUI uses RFID technology for object identification and Bluetooth communication to transmit data to the computer where the system??s software is running. We incorporated our system in three games that allow children of different ages to benefit from the system??s functionalities and encourage them to interact with it.     

Supporting interactive presentation for distributed multimedia applications

In this paper we present IMP, a platform to support the authoring and run-time management of interactive multimedia applications in distributed environments. The multi-level platform model encourages slot-in extensibility to cater for the evolving environment. We illustrate with our prototype platform built above the Cambridge multimedia environment. The authoring model emphasises reusability, tailorability and use of environment features in a uniform way. We have shown the validity of our approach by constructing a variety of application types.     

Evaluating interactive multimedia products for the home

Abstract

Multimedia information systems, supplied on CD-ROM, are fast becoming a popular consumer product. A huge and growing range of titles is available from high street computer, electrical goods and book shops. In an attempt to provide a compact set of evaluation criteria for these products, established methods in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-assisted learning (CAL) and information retrieval are considered. The needs and desires of the home user are substantially different from those of the work place or education user. Observations from product use, and an interview study with home multimedia users, suggests that factors such as aesthetics, levels of interactivity and information content may be crucially important in user satisfaction. Factors such as interface clarity and consistency may be less important than in work place systems.     

High-definition multimedia for multiparty low-latency interactive communication

We describe a high-quality collaborative environment that uses High-Definition (HD) video to achieve near realistic perception of a remote site. The capture part, consisting of a HD camera, Centaurus HD-SDI capture card, and UltraGrid software, produces a 1.5 Gbps UDP data stream of uncompressed HD video that is transferred over a 10GE network interface to the high-speed IP network. The HD video stream displaying uses either a software-based solution with color depth down-sampling and field de-interlacing, or another Centaurus card. Data distribution to individual participants of the videoconference is achieved using a user-controlled UDP packet reflector based on the Active Element idea. The viability of this system has been demonstrated at the iGrid 2005 conference for a three-way high quality videoconference among sites in the Czech Republic, Louisiana, and California.