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

NATO has identified Web services standards as a key enabler for interoperability between the different military systems used by various NATO nations. Compared to many civilian systems, military networks vary greatly in terms of computing resources, network bandwidth, mobility and stability, and distributed applications use several different networks concurrently or interact across them. In such dynamic and heterogeneous environments, runtime service discovery is a necessity. According to the W3C, discovery is the act of locating a machine-processable description of a Web service-related resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria. In this article we present our approach to service discovery, where we combine Web services standards and proprietary solutions using our prototype interoperability gateway. This approach has been experimentally evaluated in a military experiment featuring both mobile ad hoc networks and fixed infrastructure networks, and the results show that transparent discovery between proprietary solutions and Web services discovery standards can be achieved.

Web services discovery across heterogeneous military networks

Distributed interactive applications have become increasingly popular, making it important to address their communication needs, where one of the needs is group communication. In this paper, we consider the applications in which it is at any given time possible to divide its users into groups. The group membership changes over time, and the group division is unrelated to the physical proximity. As a way of enabling the group communication in distributed interactive applications, we choose application layer multicast. We use simulation to evaluate several dynamic algorithms for managing overlay multicast trees. They are compared with respect to four metrics that can be relevant for a distributed interactive application. These are total tree cost, diameter, reconfiguration time and stability. We demonstrate algorithms that perform well for these metrics although they do not consider all users during reconfiguration.

Dynamic Group Membership Management for Distributed Interactive Applications

In this tutorial we present dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP ranging from content creation to consumption. It particular, it provides an overview of the recently ratified MPEG-DASH standard, how to create content to be delivered using DASH, its consumption, and the evaluation thereof with respect to competing industry solutions. The tutorial can be roughly clustered into three parts. In part I we will provide an introduction to DASH, part II covers content creation, delivery, and consumption, and, finally, part III deals with the evaluation of existing (open source) MPEG-DASH implementations compared to state-of-art deployed industry solutions.

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Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP: from content creation to consumption

In this article, we argue that the energy spent in designing autonomous camera control systems is not spent in vain. We present a real-time virtual camera system that can create smooth camera motion. Similar systems are frequently benchmarked with the human operator as the best possible reference; however, we avoid a priori assumptions in our evaluations. Our main question is simply whether we can design algorithms to steer a virtual camera that can compete with the user experience for recordings from an expert operator with several years of experienceq In this respect, we present two low-complexity servoing methods that are explored in two user studies. The results from the user studies give a promising answer to the question pursued. Furthermore, all components of the system meet the real-time requirements on commodity hardware. The growing capabilities of both hardware and network in mobile devices give us hope that this system can be deployed to mobile users in the near future. Moreover, the design of the presented system takes into account that services to concurrent users must be supported.

The Cameraman Operating My Virtual Camera is Artificial: Can the Machine Be as Good as a Humanq

Delivering high resolution, high bitrate panorama video to a large number of users introduces huge scaling challenges. To reduce the resource requirement, researchers have earlier proposed tiling in order to deliver different qualities in different spatial parts of the video. In our work, providing an interactive moving virtual camera to each user, tiling may be used to reduce the quality depending on the position of the virtual view. This raises new challenges compared to existing tiling approaches as the need for high quality tiles dynamically change. In this paper, we describe a tiling approach of panorama video for interactive virtual cameras where we provide initial results showing the introduced overheads and the potential reduction in bandwidth requirement.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Web services discovery across heterogeneous military networks

Dynamic Group Membership Management for Distributed Interactive Applications

Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP: from content creation to consumption

The Cameraman Operating My Virtual Camera is Artificial: Can the Machine Be as Good as a Humanq

Tiling of panorama video for interactive virtual cameras: Overheads and potential bandwidth requirement reduction