Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.

Digital Watermarking

User Generated Content (UGC) is re-shaping the way people watch video and TV, with millions of video producers and consumers. In particular, UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns and social interactions, empowering users to be more creative, and developing new business opportunities. To better understand the impact of UGC systems, we have analyzed YouTube, the world's largest UGC VoD system. Based on a large amount of data collected, we provide an in-depth study of YouTube and other similar UGC systems. In particular, we study the popularity life-cycle of videos, the intrinsic statistical properties of requests and their relationship with video age, and the level of content aliasing or of illegal content in the system. We also provide insights on the potential for more efficient UGC VoD systems (e.g. utilizing P2P techniques or making better use of caching). Finally, we discuss the opportunities to leverage the latent demand for niche videos that are not reached today due to information filtering effects or other system scarcity distortions. Overall, we believe that the results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding UGC systems and can provide valuable information to ISPs, site administrators, and content owners with major commercial and technical implications.

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I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system

An interactive television program guide with remote access is provided. The interactive television program guide is implemented on interactive television program guide equipment. A remote program guide access device is connected to the interactive television program guide equipment by a remote access link to provide a user with remote access to program guide functions. An interactive television program guide system based on multiple user television equipment devices in a single household is provided. The system provides a user with an opportunity to adjust program guide settings with a given one of the interactive television program guides. Program guide setting include features related to setting program reminders, profiles, program recording features, messaging features, favorites features, parental control features, program guide set up features (e.g., audio and video and language settings), etc.

Interactive television program guide with remote access

A system for integrating video programming with the vast information resources of the Internet. A computer-based system receives a video program with embedded uniform resource locators (URLs). The URLs, the effective addresses of locations or Web sites on the Internet, are interpreted by the system and direct the system to the Web site locations to retrieve related Web pages. Upon receipt of the Web pages by the system, the Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display. The video program signal can be displayed on a video window on a conventional personal computer screen. The actual retrieved Web pages are time stamped to also be displayed, on another portion of the display screen, when predetermined related video content is displayed in the video window. As an alternative, the computer-based system receives the URLs directly through an Internet connection, at times specified by TV broadcasters in advance. The system interprets the URLs and retrieves the appropriate Web pages. The Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display in conjunction with a television program being broadcast to the user at that time. This alternative system allows the URLs to be entered for live transmission to the user.

Enhanced video programming system and method for incorporating and displaying retrieved integrated Internet information segments

A system and method for scheduling the receipt of desired movies and other forms of data from a network which simultaneously distributes many sources of such data to many customers, as in a cable television system. Customer profiles are developed for the recipient describing how important certain characteristics of the broadcast video program, movie or other data are to each customer. From these profiles, an 'agreement matrix' (908) is calculated by comparing the recipient's profiles to the actual profiles of the characteristics of the available video programs, movies, or other data. The agreement matrix (908) thus characterizes the attractiveness of each video program, movie, or other data to each prospective customer. 'Virtual' channels are generated from the agreement matrix (908) to produce a series of video or data programming which will provide the greatest satisfaction to each customer. Feedback paths (1020, 1024) are also provided so that the customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the video programs or other data may be modified to reflect actual usage, and so that the data downloaded to the customer's set top terminal (620) may be minimized. Kiosks (figure 11) are also developed which assist customers in the selection of videos, music, books, and the like in accordance with the customer's objective profiles.

System and method for scheduling broadcast of and access to video programs and other data using customer profiles

One of the most difficult tasks when creating an online multi-player game is to provide the players with a consistent view of the virtual world despite the network delays. Most current games use prediction algorithms to achieve this, but usually it does not go beyond applying the DIS [2] dead reckoning algorithm proposed in the mid-90s. In this paper we introduce a simulator called GLS that allows us to evaluate different aspects of DIS and its variations. We examine the impact of prediction and clock synchronization on game consistency. We also evaluate the convergence algorithm we introduce here. Furthermore we look into ways for compensating increasing delays to keep the player's view of the game state sufficiently consistent with other players.

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Evaluating dead reckoning variations with a multi-player game simulator

Cloud Gaming is an emerging service that catches growing interest in the research community as well as industry. Cloud Gaming require a highly reliable and low latency network to achieve a satisfying Quality of Experience (QoE) for its users. Using a cloud gaming service with high latency would harm the interaction of the user with the game, leading to a decrease in playing performance and, thus players frustrations. However, the negative effect of delay on gaming QoE depends strongly on the game content. At a certain level of delay, a slow-paced card game is typically not as delay sensitive as a shooting game. For optimal resource allocation and quality estimation, it is highly important for cloud providers, game developers, and network planners to consider the impact of the game content. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the delay impact on QoE for cloud gaming applications by identifying game characteristics influencing the delay perception of the users. In addition, an expert evaluation methodology to quantify these characteristics as well as a delay sensitivity classification based on a decision tree are presented. The results indicated an excellent level of agreement, which demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method. Additionally, the decision tree reached an accuracy of 90% on determining the delay sensitivity classes which were derived from a large dataset of subjective input quality ratings during a series of experiments.

Delay sensitivity classification of cloud gaming content

One of the main challenges when streaming video to mobile devices is to handle fluctuating bandwidth and frequent network outages as the device is brought in and out of areas with network coverage. In this paper, we propose bitrate and video quality planning algorithms for mobile streaming scenarios using a GPS-based bandwidth-lookup service in order to reduce frequently changing video quality and the number of playout interruptions. Our real world experiments using an adaptive segmented HTTP video streaming system while travelling on popular commute routes indicate that the users' quality of experience is greatly increased.

Bitrate and video quality planning for mobile streaming scenarios using a GPS-based bandwidth lookup service

A large number of live segmented adaptive HTTP video streaming services exist in the Internet today. These quasi-live solutions have been shown to scale to a large number of concurrent users, but the characteristic on-off traffic pattern makes TCP behave differently compared to the bulk transfers the protocol is designed for. In this paper, we analyze the TCP performance of such live on-off sources, and we investigate possible improvements in order to increase the resource utilization on the server side. We observe that the problem is the bandwidth wastage because of the synchronization of the on period. We investigate four different techniques to mitigate this problem. We first evaluate the techniques on pure on-off traffic using a fixed quality and then repeat the experiments with quality adaptation.

Performance of on-off traffic stemming from live adaptive segmented HTTP video streaming

The process of finding diseases and abnormalities during live medical examinations has for a long time depended mostly on the medical personnel, with a limited amount of computer support. However, computer-based medical systems are currently emerging in domains like endoscopies of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. In this context, we aim for a system that enables automatic analysis of endoscopy videos, where one use case is live computer-assisted endoscopy that increases disease-and abnormality-detection rates. In this paper, a system that tackles live automatic analysis of endoscopy videos is presented with a particular focus on the system's ability to perform in real time. The presented system utilizes different parts of a heterogeneous architecture and can be used for automatic analysis of high-definition colonoscopy videos (and a fully automated analysis of video from capsular endoscopy devices). We describe our implementation and report the system performance of our GPU-based processing framework. The experimental results show real-time stream processing and low resource consumption, and a detection precision and recall level at least as good as existing related work.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Evaluating dead reckoning variations with a multi-player game simulator

Delay sensitivity classification of cloud gaming content

Bitrate and video quality planning for mobile streaming scenarios using a GPS-based bandwidth lookup service

Performance of on-off traffic stemming from live adaptive segmented HTTP video streaming

GPU-Accelerated Real-Time Gastrointestinal Diseases Detection