Live Audio Research Articles

European Athletics Championship: Lessons from a Live, HDR, HFR, UHD, and Next-Generation Audio Sports Event

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and several of its member organizations undertook an ambitious trial over the summer period—a live, ultrahigh-definition, high dynamic range, high frame rate, wide color gamut, and next-generation audio trial at the European Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany. The trial included four 2160p/100 cameras with live control of shading/racking, live vision mixing, live recording, live mixing of audio objects, audiovisual synchronization with audio objects, and live encoding. This paper looks at the lessons learned during the trial—what went well, what needed extra work, and what is needed to overcome current technical hurdles.

Evaluation of video payload over low latency networks: Flexilink

ABSTRACTBroadcast organisations need to handle both time deterministic traffic and best effort traffic. The adoption of packet networks allows a single converged network for handling both real-time (RT) media traffic as well as data traffic. Due to the historic pervasive growth of IP network, they are widely used to realise this converged network. However, they do have several drawbacks like big header size, software switching delays and inability to support multiple addressing schemes. To overcome these issues, solutions like traffic engineering, quality of service and over-provisioning are implemented in IP networks but has resulted in higher cost, power and system requirements. Flexilink network has been tested for audio payloads using simulation model and outperforms any existing RT network by providing an exceptional average end-to-end delay of microsecond range and a jitter below the audible threshold for live digital audio streaming. However, it is not tested for video payloads. A review of various networks used RT media distribution is included in this paper. The Flexilink architecture design modification to support the most widely used video formats such as MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS and SDI streams is explained. The average delay for multiple video streams over Flexilink is provided using simulation model. The recommendation for testing Flexilink using hardware is also explained in this paper.The Flexilink Mac design uses dual-buffer system to handle AF (asynchronous flow) and SF (synchronous flow) separately, with the Frame structure that supports current Ethernet frames.

The Live Audio Archive

The Live Audio Archive is the shifting pool of real-time audio available online. Each year on International Dawn Chorus Day, SoundCamp draws on these materials for Reveil: a 24-hour broadcast of live sounds of daybreak that loops the earth with the Grey Line of twilight. Reveil brings remote ecological and acoustic projects together in a tour of this emerging field. Technical resources developed for the project are applicable to both ecoacoustics and musical composition. Affordable and simple, they have potential to create an extended and diversified open microphone network as a resource for researchers, artists and activists.

Smartphone-Based Gait Recognition: From Authentication to Imitation

This work evaluates the security strength of a smartphone-based gait recognition system against zero-effort and live minimal-effort impersonation attacks under realistic scenarios. For this purpose, we developed an Android application, which uses a smartphone-based accelerometer to capture gait data continuously in the background, but only when an individual walks. Later, it analyzes the recorded gait data and establishes the identity of an individual. At first, we tested the performance of this system against zero-effort attacks by using a dataset of 35 participants. Later, live impersonation attacks were performed by five professional actors who are specialized in mimicking body movements and body language. These attackers were paired with their physiologically close victims, and they were given live audio and visual feedback about their latest impersonation attempt during the whole experiment. No false positives under impersonation attacks, indicate that mimicry does not improve chances of attackers being accepted by our gait authentication system. In 29 percent of total impersonation attempts, when attackers walked like their chosen victim, they lost regularity between their steps which makes impersonation even harder for attackers.

Sleeve gastrectomy telementoring: a SAGES multi-institutional quality improvement initiative.

Sleeve gastrectomy is a relatively new procedure that developed as a result of rapid innovation in the field of bariatric surgery. As with any newly developed operation, there is a learning curve that potentially can be associated with higher morbidity. Real-time surgical mentoring reduces the learning curve effect but can be time intensive for the mentor. The aim of this initiative was to evaluate the feasibility, effectiveness, and satisfaction of surgical telementoring for laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy. This is the first national specialty society effort to determine if the "remote presence" of an expert surgeon (mentor) can help practicing surgeons improve skills. The experience of 15 surgical trainees (mentees) who performed laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy under real-time telementoring by 7 mentors was reviewed. Telementoring was implemented using the Visitor1® remote presence system with two-way live audio and video communication. The receiving platform utilized a conventional laptop, iPad, or iPhone. The mentee followed a structured telementoring program including didactic learning, live case teleobservation, and telementoring of 2-3 cases. A survey on the quality of the telecommunication and effectiveness of the mentoring was performed by the mentor and mentee on a scale of "exceeded," "met," "almost met," or "failed to meet" expectations. The overall telementoring experience was rated on a scale of 1 for "poor" to 5 for "excellent." Based on the mentees' survey, the overall telementoring experience was rated as 4.8. Despite the mentees having experience with laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy, most commented that the telementoring experience was an excellent educational tool and they learned some new techniques they plan to apply it in their practice. Based on the mentors' survey, the overall telementoring experience was rated as 4.7. All mentors stated that they were satisfied with the telementoring sessions and there were no unexpected intraoperative occurrences. There were some logistical limitations including difficulties in scheduling of cases or the delay of cases. Surgical instruction by telementoring was shown to be feasible, practical, and successful, and was highly rated in this study by both the mentors and mentees. The currently utilized telementoring platform is thus an effective educational tool that can facilitate acquisition of surgical skills and assist with the conventional on-site surgical mentoring model.

Low Delay Video Streaming on the Internet of Things Using Raspberry Pi

The Internet of Things is predicted to consist of over 50 billion devices aiming to solve problems in most areas of our digital society. A large part of the data communicated is expected to consist of various multimedia contents, such as live audio and video. This article presents a solution for the communication of high definition video in low-delay scenarios (<200 ms) under the constraints of devices with limited hardware resources, such as the Raspberry Pi. We verify that it is possible to enable low delay video streaming between Raspberry Pi devices using a distributed Internet of Things system called the SensibleThings platform. Specifically, our implementation transfers a 6 Mbps H.264 video stream of 1280 × 720 pixels at 25 frames per second between devices with a total delay of 181 ms on the public Internet, of which the overhead of the distributed Internet of Things communication platform only accounts for 18 ms of this delay. We have found that the most significant bottleneck of video transfer on limited Internet of Things devices is the video coding and not the distributed communication platform, since the video coding accounts for 90% of the total delay.

Online e-learning application for practicing foreign language skills with native speakers

The paper describes an online e-learning web-based application for practicing foreign language skills with native speakers. Educational materials are a part of the application, along with the live audio–video feed between the participants. The proposed technology is designed to supplement traditional methods of studying spoken language by bringing native speakers, students, and language-learning materials in one place. The main research question is whether strangers, first met on the internet can teach and learn languages using integrated training materials. In the developed platform, any native speaker can perform a role of a teacher, i.e., facilitator of foreign language learning. Over 40,000 users registered in the system over a 6-month period. The system includes gamification as the part of user retention and virality mechanisms.

An Investigation into the Challenges Faced by Secondary School Teachers in Integrating Internet into the Teaching and Learning Process in Zimbabwe: a Case Study of Harare Province

Most schools are now in possession of computers both in urban and rural areas in Zimbabwe and in many other developing countries. The mushrooming of computers has led to developments and changes not only in business sectors, but, also in education. There are many ways that teachers can use to integrate Internet into the school curriculum to enhance authentic learning. Schools can use the Internet to give students access to the latest information around the planet, allow students to participate in global projects of all kinds, to bring experts from numerous fields right into the classroom, interact with people from around the world via live video and audio for free; among many uses of Internet. The big question however is, how can teachers use internet in existing curriculum to enhance academic achievement of their students and also the teachers’ professional development? In view of the above observations, this study sought to establish the challenges that teachers face in integrating Internet into the teaching and learning process in Zimbabwean secondary schools drawing on a quantitative inquiry. The study adopted the descriptive survey design. The target population comprised all teachers in Harare province. The sample consisted of 450 teachers randomly sampled. All the information was collected through a questionnaire which largely had close-ended questions and one open-ended question. The study revealed that most teachers had negative attitudes towards the use of Internet in the classroom. Lack of professional development also hindered the smooth integration of Internet into the curriculum. Schools did not provide full access of computers to teachers. The findings also revealed that schools did not provide adequate leadership support and technical support to teachers. The study recommends that teachers should be capacitated to use the Internet for the benefit of the pupils through professional development. Schools should provide ad; equate leadership and technical support to teachers. Keywords: Curriculum, Integration, Internet, Teachers, Secondary School, Province, Challenges

Teaching Cybersecurity Using the Cloud

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our experience when using cloud computing to teach a senior course on cybersecurity across two campuses via a virtual classroom equipped with live audio and video. Furthermore, based on this teaching experience, we propose guidelines that can be applied to teach similar computer science and engineering courses. We demonstrate how cloud-based laboratory exercises can greatly help students in acquiring crucial cybersecurity skills as well as cloud computing ones, which are in high demand nowadays. The cloud we used for this course was the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. However, our presented use cases and approaches are equally applicable to other available cloud platforms such as Rackspace and Google Compute Engine, among others.

Mobile Data Offloading for Streaming-Class Traffic with QoS Guarantee

Faced with the tremendous increase in the amount of data traffic and associated congestion, mobile network operators are moving towards Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), in the process of expanding network capacity. Offloading data traffic onto Wi-Fi in order to avoid congestion in the backbone is an important step in the evolution of HetNets. On-the-spot and delayed offloading have been widely studied in the literature. This paper proposes an offloading algorithm which has low computational complexity. The proposed algorithm offloads data based on a balking function which is dependent on present network condition. Using extensive simulations, the authors demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves reduction in mean transmission delay without sacrificing much on the offloading efficiency. This technique is more efficient and applicable to real-time traffic, like live streaming video and audio, which has short and stringent delay requirements or deadlines.

Evaluating the use of social media to conduct clinical performance reviews of advanced practice nursing students

Although nurse leaders have argued for years that faculty clinical observations of students should be direct, the feasibility of this in online nursing programs is a challenge. As such, one would expect that the development of technology-based methods which permit direct evaluation of students in real time from a distance should be well underway. If so, little has been done to investigate the impact of methods utilizing social media strategies to evaluate clinical work of Advanced Practice Registered Nurse students. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate advanced practice nursing student and clinical preceptor perceptions of the feasibility and benefit of a real time student clinical performance review utilizing social media strategies which incorporated live audio and video feed. The quantitative data supports the use of synchronous evaluation and lends support to the need and viability for a real-time evaluation of students which is perceived as beneficial and feasible to preceptor, student, and faculty.

Towards enhanced community genetic literacy among a minority ethnic community: a participatory action research project

BackgroundInfant mortality is a key public health outcome showing substantial socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in the UK. The UK Pakistani population has an infant mortality rate of over nine per 1000 livebirths, more than twice that for the population as a whole. Increased risk is partly attributable to rare autosomal recessive genetic disorders linked to the practice of customary consanguineous marriage. WHO recommends community-level action to raise genetic literacy combined with enhanced genetics services. However, UK interventions are in their infancy, with varied local initiatives and no national response. A combination of a valued social practice affecting marginalised communities, complicated patterns of risk, and low professional awareness, makes this a complex and contentious issue. Indeed, some previous intervention has generated considerable backlash. This study in Sheffield, a northern English city, aimed to develop a community-level genetic literacy intervention that would be sensitive and responsive to local information needs. MethodsA participatory approach was used, drawing on a user-centred design and engaging local people as coresearchers. Two phases of insight gathering made use of group discussions, interviews, and participatory exercises to describe current understanding, gaps in knowledge, and trusted networks of communication. A series of testing-and-refinement cycles were then undertaken to coproduce a set of communication materials tailored to subgroups, with materials being tested for acceptability, appeal, and comprehension. FindingsSix local people were trained as coresearchers. Over 200 people participated in the insight and testing work. Information needs and preferred communication channels varied widely, confirming population heterogeneity and diverse perspectives to the issue. Despite some resistance, there was strong demand for information and willingness to discuss the topic. Conveying accurate and consistent information was challenging, as was meeting differing demands for detail within generic materials. Key areas of confusion and mistrust were addressed. Narrative, real life audio (for local radio) and video (for social media) were recommended and developed, supported by factual information in leaflet and website form, and contained links to religious resources plus genetics services. InterpretationDevelopment of appropriate community-level genetic literacy interventions can be achieved through participatory action research. Evaluative work is now needed to assess the effect on knowledge and service uptake. FundingGenetics Disorders UK funded the study. SS is a Senior Research Fellow funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Public Health Research. Preparatory work was funded by NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research & Care for South Yorkshire.

Soft Margin Based Low-Rank Audio Signal Classification

We propose an algorithm to do audio signal classification based on low-rank matrix representative audio data. Conventionally, the low-rank matrix data can be represented by a vector in high dimensional space. Some learning algorithms are then applied in such a vector space for matrix data classification. Particularly, maximum margin classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM) etc. have received much attention due to their effectiveness. In this paper, we classify the data directly in the matrix space. Our methodology is built on recent studies about matrix classification with the trace norm constrained weight matrix and SVM's large-margin linear discrimination principle. The resulting low-rank SVM is then designed to maximize the margin between classes whilst minimizing the complexity of the classifier in both original and low-rank space. We compared our proposed algorithm with SVM and other state-of-the-art matrix signal classification methods. Experimental studies on real life audio signal classification show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

An Innovative Technique for Recording Picture‐in‐Picture Ultrasound Videos

Many ultrasound educational products and ultrasound researchers present diagnostic and interventional ultrasound information using picture-in-picture videos, which simultaneously show the ultrasound image and transducer and patient positions. Traditional techniques for creating picture-in-picture videos are expensive, nonportable, or time-consuming. This article describes an inexpensive, simple, and portable way of creating picture-in-picture ultrasound videos. This technique uses a laptop computer with a video capture device to acquire the ultrasound feed. Simultaneously, a webcam captures a live video feed of the transducer and patient position and live audio. Both sources are streamed onto the computer screen and recorded by screen capture software. This technique makes the process of recording picture-in-picture ultrasound videos more accessible for ultrasound educators and researchers for use in their presentations or publications.

A Case Study for Combining Technologies for the Delivery of Information Literacy and Community to Students at Remote Locations Using Live Synchronous Video-Conferencing

The University of La Verne, a pioneer in the field of adult and distance education, hosts approximately 4,692 traditional undergraduate and graduate students on the main campus, 3,350 adult students, and hundreds of online students throughout California at nine regional campuses. Challenged by limited funding and staffing, the library and Regional Campus Administration collaborated with senior management to pilot a blended technology platform using Adobe Connect for content and live video streaming and Business Skype for audio to deliver real-time, interactive virtual information literacy to distance learners. The initial objective of “Library on Demand” was to supplement existing in-person, e-mail, and telephonic library information literacy instruction with live streaming video and two-way audio. The use of multi-channel instructional technologies would optimize outreach activities, reaching larger numbers of student communities while optimizing student learning modality preferences and differences. The pilot program was designed in phases to test the integrity of reaching over 3,500 students among the nine regional campus locations concurrently with a single librarian host. Later phases offer opportunities for targeted or specialized sessions including applications fostering emerging virtual social learning communities beyond a shared information literacy experience.

Reaching the audience: new communication technology practices in college sports public relations

The Internet has created new communication alternatives and challenges in public relations. Despite the increase in social media and multimedia in college sports public relations, no research has been conducted into which tools are utilized most, where those tools may be found on athletic websites, or how PR offices utilize such tools. This study intends to fill that gap. Grounded in a co-orientation model of communication, it utilized a content analysis of college athletic websites (N = 120) and a telephone survey with 16 college sports public relations professionals. Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds are the social media tools utilized most often, while live video and audio and archived video are the most frequently used multimedia tools. Most tools are identified by a graphic in the right-hand column on departments' home pages. Tools are used primarily for disseminating information. Usually the director maintains the site alone without a published policy.

CUSTP: Custom Protocol for Audio and Video Conferencing System over P2P Networks

Tremendous amount of research work is underway on peer to peer Systems and Video Streaming. In this paper the researchers have developed a LAN-based using client/server and Peer to peer architecture for transmitting and receiving multimedia. We have proposed Custom protocol to make the LAN clients of this application can use any sort of platform and provides many other useful utilities for heterogeneous system such as A/V Streaming and security issues. The second goal is to develop plug-in for proxy server to support our system because proxy users are unable to use such type of applications on the Internet. The experimental results show that the Live Audio and Video Coverage is p2p system and it is new revolution in the field of distributed world and it really tough work, to understand networking, network bandwidth, A/V encoding, A/V decoding, format setting and compression techniques. In addition, when the authors compared CUSTP with JMF RTP, the CUSTP almost equal JMF RTP in terms of jitter but is much better than JMF RTP in delay.

Fast Caption Alignment for Automatic Indexing of Audio

For large archives of audio media, just as with text archives, indexing is important for allowing quick and accurate searches. Similar to text archives, audio archives can use text for indexing. Generating this text requires using transcripts of the spoken portions of the audio. From them, an alignment can be made that allows users to search for specific content and immediately view the content at the position where the search terms were spoken. Although previous research has addressed this issue, the solutions align the transcripts only in real-time or greater. In this paper, the authors propose AutoCap. It is capable of producing accurate audio indexes in faster than real-time for archived audio and in real-time for live audio. In most cases it takes less than one quarter the original duration for archived audio. This paper discusses the architecture and evaluation of the AutoCap project as well as two of its applications.

A software-based receiver running on a single DSP for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting

This paper presents the design and implementation of a software (SW)-based receiver running on a single digital signal processor (DSP) for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (TDMB). Implementing the functions of the physical layer such as synchronization and channel decoding as well as codec decoders for a TDMB receiver in software running a DPS raises numerous design and implementation issues. We present solutions to these issues including an efficient software receiver structure, efficient algorithms with low complexity, real-time scheduling, reduction of the execution cycle number, and data transfer and communication between function blocks in the receiver, with a focus on the physical layer. The SW-based TDMB receiver developed in the present work can change and upgrade its functions and adapt to new standards. The performance of the implemented receiver was verified through successful decoding of live audio and video signals.

Pricing the quality of differentiated services for media-oriented real-time applications: A multi-attribute negotiation approach

The paper proposes a new algorithm for negotiating the price of quality of service in IP differentiated services networks. We focus on real-time media-oriented applications such as video conferencing, online gaming, broadcast TV and live events, streaming video, and audio on demand. The performance objectives of end-users are expressed as the end-to-end delay thresholds to be exceeded with a given maximum probability. The target of negotiation is a multi-attribute description of traffic profile and quality of service, rather than the simple raw-bandwidth attribute. The service class chosen for each traffic flow is the result of negotiation and depends on the user's and supplier's utility and quality functions and on their conceding versus selfish negotiation attitude. We model non-linear utility and quality functions in such a way to represent the user's and supplier's perception of quality of service parameters. This represents a fundamental contribution of this paper with respect to current approaches accounting for simple linear utility functions of the raw-bandwidth attribute. We analyze the utilization of network resources as well as the customer's and supplier's utility through simulation by comparing our algorithm with previous algorithms negotiating raw-bandwidth instead of end-to-end quality of service.