Design by a CBIR System Supporting High Level Concepts

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems that are able to “retrieve images of Clinton with Lewinsky” are unrealistic at present. However, this area has seen much research and development activity since IBM’s QBIC announcement in 1994. The CHITRA CBIR system under development at the RMIT and Monash Universities, addresses the need for a test bed system. Users can dynamically incorporate new features and similarity measures in to the system, enabling it to act as a testbed for CBIR research. The system uses a 4-level data model we have developed and supports definition and querying of high level concepts such as MOUNTAIN and SUNSET. These advanced capabilities are supported by a powerful graphical query mechanism and a high-dimensional indexing structure based on linear mapping. In this paper we describe the design of the system, our contributions to the state of the art and provide some implementation details.

Semantic Content-Based Retrieval for Video Documents

The advancement of multimedia technologies has enabled electronic processing of information to be recorded in formats that are different from the standard text format. These include image, audio and video formats. The video format is a rich and expressive form of media used in many areas of our everyday life, such as in education, medicine and engineering. The expressiveness of video documents is the main reason for their domination in future information systems. Therefore, effective and efficient access to video information that supports video-based applications has become a critical research area. This has led to the development of, for example, new digitizing and compression tools and technology, video data models and query languages, video data management systems and video analyzers. With applications of a vast amount of stored video data, such as news archives and digital television, video retrieval became, and still is, an active area of research.

Remote Control for Videoconferencing

We have designed, implemented, and deployed a camera control system and a conference controller that provide remote control capabilities for videoconferencing over the Internet. The camera control system allows users to pan, tilt, and zoom the cameras, switch between cameras, and get a picture-in-picture view from their desktops. The conference controller allows conference participants to not only start and stop the media tools on a remote host, but also to dynamically change settings and turn transmission on and off. It supports the vic (video) and vat (audio) Internet videoconferencing tools and enhances their usability by providing an integrated and secure user interface for local and remote control of these applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of the camera control system (devserv and camclnt) and the conference controller (confcntlr). The remote control capabilities offered by these tools have changed the videoconferencing paradigm to one of telepresence. With these tools remote users can “walk” around the room, focus in on objects, and actively participate rather than just observe.

A Linguistically Sortable Bengali Coding System and Its Application in Spell Checking

By developing an inter-scheme text conversion utility, we have established in (Murshed et al., 1998) that use of non-lossy transformation instead of lossy transformation for sorting Bengali texts in linguistic order has some extra benefit. In this paper we discuss another very important application of non-lossy transformation by developing an efficient spell checking application for Bengali texts based on the internal coding scheme with non-lossy transformation. As usual, the handling of compound letters remains the key area where a Bengali text speller differs from its counterparts in other languages. Here we establish that using of the internal coding scheme in designing the dictionary and developing suggestion generating search engine not only provides a spell checking solution which is independent of any specific primary coding scheme but also assists in designing layered solution for efficient modularization and maintenance of coding. This chapter is organized as follows. In the next section we present the basic properties of Bengali script. For the sake of completeness, some results and algorithms on sorting Bengali texts in linguistic order, developed in (Murshed et al., 1998), are given in the third section. In the fourth section, we discuss various issues of developing an efficient primary coding scheme independent spell checking application based on our solution to linguistically sorting Bengali texts. The final section concludes the paper.

Principles for Supporting and Enhancing User Navigation of Digital Video in Video Browsers

Video browsers provide an environment in which a user may navigate digital video content. They are therefore an important application for improving access to digital video resources. We apply a general framework for navigation, proposed by Spence (1999), and consider existing proposals for video browsers made within the research literature within the context of the framework. We then use this analysis to derive a number of principles that reflect the requirements for supporting and enhancing the user in the digital video navigation task.

A Collaborative Design-by-Sketching Conceptual Design Tool for Multimedia Application Development

Multimedia technology is advancing at a significant rate and is now revolutionizing the way in which computers are being used in business. Multimedia technology can only benefit a company when applications are properly developed to exploit technology, in order to enhance the company’s operation. Unfortunately, to develop high-quality, cost-effective multimedia applications is not an easy task. There are many issues and challenges that developers are currently facing. Issues such as the difficulties in defining the project scope, communication difficulties amongst the development team, and estimate difficulties, making the development process both labour-intensive and time-consuming (Li and Willis, 1998). Sponsors of multimedia projects are often unsure of their requirements at the start of the project. Sponsor/user involvement in the abstract (conceptual) design stage of the project is therefore important. This chapter presents a computer assisted design-by-sketching tool to help with the conceptual design of multimedia applications. The tool helps sponsors to define their requirement incrementally and the design team to prototype their ideas interactively and collaboratively. It assists the developer to define the balance between consistency, which helps the readers (users) to understand the overall structure, and diversity, which gives freshness to the design. This tool will also enable re-usability of the designed components in future projects and maintainability of the application that it has developed.

Multimedia Copyright Protection

Internet and its widespread usage for multimedia document distribution put the copyright issue in a complete new setting. Multimedia documents, specifically those installed on a web page, are no longer passive as they typically include active applets. Copyright protection safeguards the intellectual property (IP) of multimedia documents, which are either sold or distributed free of charge. In this Chapter, the basic tools for copyright protection are discussed. First, general concepts and the vocabulary used in copyright protection of multimedia documents are discussed. Later, taxonomy of watermarking and fingerprinting techniques are studied. This part is concluded by a review of the literature dealing with IP security. The main part of the chapter discusses the generic watermarking scheme and illustrates it on three specific examples: collusion-free watermarking, spread spectrum watermarking, and software fingerprinting. Future trends and conclusions close the chapter.

Cognition Research Basis for Instructional Multimedia

The work described in this chapter is a synthesis of recent instructional cognition research implications for fundamental educational multimedia theory. Most of the research described here has been conducted in the Cognitive Load Theory context. The leading research group in this area is located at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, and a complementary cognition research program is based at the Open University of Netherlands. The work emanating from these groups and allied efforts elsewhere has significant implications for multimedia use in various educational contexts. In this chapter the structure of human cognitive architecture will be described from an information processing perspective. Then the cognitive load theory will be introduced. The implications of multimodal experiments for multimedia instruction will be derived in the cognitive load theory context. The interaction of multimodal instruction and material complexity or element interactivity plus prior knowledge will be considered. Then the research on the instructional effects of moving images and sound will be discussed from a cognitive perspective. Methods for alleviating the visual search on complex multimedia screens employing focusing or linking strategies will be described. Guidelines for the effective design and use of educational multimedia in a global context will be noted in each section. Finally general issues of future research interest will be discussed. The objectives of this chapter are to suggest a theoretical foundation for multimodal multimedia instruction, and to distil from the relevant cognition research a number of practical implications for educational multimedia planning, design and use.

Educational Multimedia and Teacher Competencies

This chapter is a step on the way to establishing a multimedia didactics for compulsory school. In the chapter we review findings from the European PEDACTICE project, which deals with these issues. It focuses on describing central teachers’ competencies, related to the use of educational multimedia in compulsory school.

Video Performance in Java

The tremendous growth in both Java and multimedia present an opportunity for cross-platform multimedia applications. However, little research has been done on Java multimedia performance. In this chapter, we present experiments that measure the multimedia performance of an MPEG-1 client in Java. We find Just-In-Time compilation, local media access and processor type significantly affect multimedia performance, while choice of operating system, Java virtual machine and garbage collection have a negligible effect on multimedia performance. Overall, Java still lags considerably behind multimedia performance in C++.