Multimedia Editing Research Articles

Green Software

Most studies and regulatory controls focus on hardware-related measurement, analysis, and control for energy consumption. However, all forms of hardware include significant software components. Although software systems don't consume energy directly, they affect hardware utilization, leading to indirect energy consumption. Therefore, it's important to engineer software to optimize its energy consumption. The software engineering research domain has recently been paying attention to sustainability, as the increased number of publications, empirical studies, and conferences on the topic demonstrate. The guest editors of this special issue explain the articles they selected to highlight this important research area. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/h0tQoOH9_aM is an audio interview in which IEEE Software multimedia editor Davide Falessi interviews guest editor Ayse Basar Bener about how green software can help minimize the negative effects of software products and their development.

Virtual Teams [Guest editors' introduction

Over the past decades, today, and in the future, business contexts in software organizations and the common ways of developing software are changing dramatically. Formation of teams in distributed environments, virtual or not, calls for new ways of working across geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. This, however, also requires effective leadership approaches enabled through systems, processes, technology, and people. The authors pulled together this special issue to provide some ideas and strategies for practitioners and open questions for researchers. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/YxE6S6MM3Ws is an audio recording in which author IEEE Software Multimedia Editor Davide Falessi interviews Laurence Tratt and Adam Welc, guest editors of the magazine's September/October 2014 issue, about the field of programming languages.

Media Commons: the process and value of centralizing services

Purpose – This paper aims to provide details of a collaborative campus effort that created a Media Commons at an undergraduate library at a major research university to provide students and faculty opportunities to experiment with emerging technologies, with expanded opportunities to learn of best practices in educational technology. Design/methodology/approach – This is a case study that used a web survey, focus groups, usage statistics, and interviews to determine the needs and best practices for creating and maintaining the Media Commons. Findings – Preliminary results indicate that this program provides value to students and faculty seeking to learn about and use multimedia for coursework and projects. It confirms the gap on campus for places students can go for loanable technology and consultation services in the production and editing of multimedia. Research limitations/implications – Because the Media Commons just launched there has not had a programmatic evaluation yet to assess the impact of this program. However, based on initial feedback, suggestions for improvements in the program are included. Practical implications – The rationale, process and efforts described in this paper can be replicated by other institutions that are interested in creating a Media Commons. Originality/value – Although there are many articles written about Learning Commons and Information Commons, there is not much available that documents the efforts of creating a Media Commons at a library and the rationale for centralizing and freely making available campus multimedia expertise and equipment.

Simplicity in IT: The Power of Less

Simplicity is a mindset, a way of looking at solutions, an extremely wide-ranging philosophical stance on the world, and thus a deeply rooted cultural paradigm. The culture of less can be profoundly disruptive, cutting out existing standard elements from products and business models, thereby revolutionizing entire markets. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/ZlRomFokV-4 is a video interview in which Computer staff multimedia editor Brian Brannon speaks with guest editor Tiziana Margaria of Universitat Potsdam about the benefits and challenges of simplicity in IT design.

Taking Care

BCS Multimedia Editor, Justin Richards, recently caught up with Justin Whatling, Chair of BCS Health, at HC2013, to talk about the Institute's involvement with the newly launched Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) and the current state of health informatics.

Sharing Your Story

IEEE Software Editor-in-Chief Forrest Shull discusses the value of experience reports and how they can bring practical advice and perspective that simple metrics are not always able to provide. In addition, he discusses Software Experts Summit 2013 and announces that the magazine is seeking a new multimedia editor. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/KTUHr-1S_wo is a video preview of Software Experts Summit 2013, which will focus on Smart Data Science: Harnessing Data for Intelligent Decision Making. Scheduled for 17 July at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, speakers include James Whittaker of Microsoft, Paul Zikopoulos of IBM, Wolfram Schulte of Microsoft Research, Ayse Bener of Ryerson University, and Forrest Shull of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering.

Multimedia Technology for Speech and Language Diagnosis and Therapy

Published research establishes that multimedia technology is increasingly being used to create learning environments in education and clinical settings. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of multimedia technology by speech and language therapists in developing their own digital material on diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Undergraduate fourth-year students were motivated to use various multimedia editing and authoring tools for diagnosis and therapy procedures in building social skills deficits. The research questions concern students’ accomplishments on intergrading multimedia technology in speech and language diagnosis and therapy, and the effectiveness of the digital environment they created. The results revealed that students used text, graphic, audio and video materials and animation to facilitate procedures in speech and language diagnosis and therapy and accomplished good outcomes while designing multimedia activities, meeting technical and pedagogical/clinical criteria. Finally, students’ multimedia technology development approaches were discussed and concluded in the demands of modern information society.

Automatic Detection of Altered Fingerprints

A new algorithm detects changes to fingerprints due to mutilation and other similar measures criminals use to evade identification. This Web extra video features Karl Ricanek of the University of North Carolina Wilmington providing an overview of the 2011 International Joint Conference on Biometrics, and Charles Severance, Computer's multimedia editor, interviewing several conference attendees from around the world.

Video Image Segmentation and Understanding

Video object extraction is a critical task in multimedia analysis and editing. Normally, the user provides some hints of foreground and background, and then the target object is extracted from the video sequence. In this paper, we propose a object segmentation system that integrates a clustering model with Markov random field-based contour tracking and graph-cut image segmentation. The contour tracking propagates the shape of the target object, whereas the graph-cut refines the shape and improves the accuracy of video segmentation. Experimental results show that our segmentation system is efficient

A Image Segmentation Scheme

A BS process involves building a model of the background and extracting regions of the foreground (moving objects) with the assumptions that the camera remains stationary and there exist no movements in the background. Video object extraction is a critical task in multimedia analysis and editing. Normally, the user provides some hints of foreground and background, and then the target object is extracted from the video sequence. In this paper, we propose a object segmentation system that integrates a clustering model with Markov random field-based contour tracking and graph-cut image segmentation. The contour tracking propagates the shape of the target object, whereas the graph-cut refines the shape and improves the accuracy of video segmentation. Experimental results show that our segmentation system is efficient.

Community-Based Development of Knowledge Products

International organizations and government agencies have developed and collected a wealth of knowledge resources relevant to poor communities; however, the people who need these resources most often do not know these materials exist or are unable to access or understand them. Electronic sources of knowledge materials and means of communication are rarely integrated with traditional methods of knowledge delivery. This paper addresses the issue of knowledge sharing with poor communities and presents a software tool for developing multimedia knowledge materials suitable for people with little or no formal education. A multimedia editor uses a data structure composed of multimedia objects (texts, images, video, and audio clips) to generate the knowledge browser. Local specialists with a basic knowledge of computing can modify and customize how the knowledge is presented by adding new materials relevant to the local environment.

Multiple Binary Images Watermarking in Spatial and Frequency Domains

Editing, reproduction and distribution of the digital multimedia are becoming extremely easier and faster with the existence of the internet and the availability of pervasive and powerful multimedia tools. Digital watermarking has emerged as a possible method to tackle these issues. This paper proposes a scheme using which more data can be inserted into an image in different domains using different techniques. This increases the embedding capacity. Using the proposed scheme 24 binary images can be embedded in the DCT domain and 12 binary images can be embedded in the spatial domain using LSB substitution technique in a single RGB image. The proposed scheme also provides an extra level of security to the watermark image by scrambling the image before embedding it into the host image. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method results in almost invisible difference between the watermarked image and the original image and is also robust against various image processing attacks.

A NOVEL SOURCE MPEG-2 VIDEO IDENTIFICATION ALGORITHM

With the availability of powerful multimedia editing software, all types of personalized image and video resources are available in networks. Multimedia forensics technology has become a new topic in the field of information security. In this paper, a new source video system identification algorithm is proposed based on the features in the video stream; it takes full advantage of the different characteristics in the rate control module and the motion prediction module, which are two open parts in the MPEG-2 video compression standard, and combines a support vector machine classifier to build an intelligent computing system for video source identification. The experiments show this proposed algorithm can effectively identify video streams that come from a number of video coding systems.

Server-Based User-Created Contents Processing System

The web 2.0 is leading a rapid change of internet services. The UCC(User Created Contents) service is one of the representative internet services with web 2.0 paradigm. in this paper, we design and implement the UCC services prototype system for image and video. The proposed system does not need to install ActiveX and client programs on devices of users to edit their contents. All processes for editing UCC are conducted on the server. Our proposed system consists of the two components such as the multimedia editing subsystem and the metαdαtα management system. They provide the API to UCC service developers or vendors. The multimedia editing subsystem supports editing for image and video. and the streaming services of video. The metαdαtα management subsystem supports the metαdαtα management and retrieval of image and video.

Watch-and-comment as a paradigm toward ubiquitous interactive video editing

The literature reports research efforts allowing the editing of interactive TV multimedia documents by end-users. In this article we propose complementary contributions relative to end-user generated interactive video, video tagging, and collaboration. In earlier work we proposed the watch-and-comment (WaC) paradigm as the seamless capture of an individual's comments so that corresponding annotated interactive videos be automatically generated. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype application, the WaCTool, that supports the capture of digital ink and voice comments over individual frames and segments of the video, producing a declarative document that specifies both: different media stream structure and synchronization. In this article, we extend the WaC paradigm in two ways. First, user-video interactions are associated with edit commands and digital ink operations. Second, focusing on collaboration and distribution issues, we employ annotations as simple containers for context information by using them as tags in order to organize, store and distribute information in a P2P-based multimedia capture platform. We highlight the design principles of the watch-and-comment paradigm, and demonstrate related results including the current version of the WaCTool and its architecture. We also illustrate how an interactive video produced by the WaCTool can be rendered in an interactive video environment, the Ginga-NCL player, and include results from a preliminary evaluation.

Caedmon's Hymn: A Multi-media Study, Edition and Archive - By Daniel Paul O'Donnell

Caedmon's Hymn: A Multi-media Study, Edition and Archive - By Daniel Paul O'Donnell

Tangible Media Control System for Intuitive Interactions with Multimedia Contents

In this paper, we present the Tangible Media Control System (TMCS), which allows users to manipulate media contents through physical objects in an intuitive way. Currently, most people access digital media contents by exploiting GUI. However, it only provides limited manipulation of the contents. The proposed system, instead of a mouse and a keyboard, adopts two types of tangible objects, i.e. a RFID-enabled object and a tracker-embedded object. The TMCS enables users to easily access and control digital media contents through tangible objects. In addition, it supports an interactive media controller which can be used to synthesize media contents according to users' taste. It also offers personalized contents, which suits users' preferences, by exploiting context such as the users' profile and situational information. Accordingly, the TMCS demonstrates that tangible interfaces with context can provide more effective interfaces to satisfy users' demands. Therefore, the proposed system can be applied to various interactive applications such as multimedia education, entertainment, multimedia editor, etc.

An update on the SimulNet educational platform. Towards standards-driven E-learning

E-learning is one of the killer applications in the new information society. Many educational systems have been developed, targeted to specific learning environments. One specific area of concern is practical training. This paper presents the latest update on the WWW-based teaching laboratory SimulNet. Particularly, we describe the functionality of the SimulNet whiteboard and authoring tools. Among others, the whiteboard features allow any kind of data sharing on the Web, on-line synchronous communication among learners and instructors and the possibility of following virtual presentations with an embedded Web-based slide projector. The SimulNet authoring environment includes a multimedia editor tool and both static and dynamic content structure generator. Also, current efforts in the learning technology standardization process were taken into account. We set the basis to become SimulNet compliant with the leading standard recommendations.

MPEG-7: A standardised description of audiovisual content

Abstract The value of information often depends on how easily it can be found, retrieved, accessed, filtered and managed. An incommensurable amount of audiovisual information is becoming available in digital form, in digital archives, on the World Wide Web, in broadcast datastreams and in personal and professional databases, and this amount is only growing. In spite of the fact that users have increasing access to these resources, identifying and managing them efficiently is becoming more difficult, because of the growing volume. The question of identifying content is not just restricted to database retrieval applications such as digital libraries, but extends to areas like broadcast channel selection, multimedia editing, and multimedia directory services. In 1996 MPEG has recognised the need to identify multimedia content, and started a work item formally called `Multimedia Content Description Interface', better known as MPEG-7. The new MPEG-7 standard will provide a rich set of standardised tools to describe multimedia content. The people active in defining MPEG-7 represent broadcasters, equipment and chip manufacturers, digital content creators and managers, telecommunication service providers, publishers and intellectual property rights managers, as well as university researchers. Both human users and automatic systems that process audiovisual information are within the scope of MPEG-7. This paper will present an overview of the MPEG-7 standardisation project. The paper concentrates on the motivations and objectives behind MPEG-7, giving some applications, outlining the process and work plan. It will also explain the relation with the other MPEG standards, notably MPEG-4.

Cooperative multimedia editing tool for enhanced group communication

We describe and sustain the decisions made during the conceptualization of a cooperative multimedia editing tool, which enables co-authors to cooperatively produce multimedia documents. The main goal is to enhance inter-user communication. Co-authors can communicate their ideas, drafts, guidelines and constraints to other co-authors using a mixture of communication patterns, media and document organization. They keep exchanging information (remotely or face-to-face), improving passages and modifying notes until a final document is achieved. Our efforts were on integrating concepts from collaboration support, multimedia document contents and multimedia communication rather than on making a specialized system for any of them. In an integrated manner, the co-authors can edit text, raster images and 2D-object-oriented graphics information. Moreover, one can communicate via a text, voice or video channel (possibly more than one simultaneously).