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

Interactive panoramic systems are currently on the rise. However, one of the major challenges in such a system is the overhead involved in transferring a full-quality panorama to the client when only a part of the panorama is used to extract a virtual view. Thus, such a system should maximize the user experience while simultaneously minimizing the bandwidth required. In this paper, we apply tiling to deliver different quality levels for different parts of the panorama. Tiling has traditionally been applied to the delivery of very high-resolution content to clients. Here, we apply similar ideas in a real-time interactive panoramic video system. A major challenge lies in the movement of such a virtual view, for which clients’ regions of interest change dynamically and independently from each other. We show that our algorithms, which progressively increase in quality toward the point of the view, manage to (i) reduce the bandwidth requirement and (ii) provide a similar quality of experience (QoE) compared to a full panorama system.

Tiling in Interactive Panoramic Video: Approaches and Evaluation

Large scale video-on-demand systems require that the serv ers offering the video retrieval and playback services are arranged as a distributed system in order to support a lar ge number of concurrent streams. If such a system is hierarchical, an end-node serv er handles the requests from a particular area, the ne xt server in the hierarchy takes the request over for several end-node servers if those can not answer the request and so on. This architecture pro vides for cost efficiency, reliability and scalability of serv ers. The end-node servers store only a limited set of the o verall available information which changes over time due to user interests. If a video is requested which is not available, this server contacts the next server in the hierarchy. To decide the size and location of the video serv ers and the location of videos in the hierarch y, the access behaviour of users must be considered. Various models for the simulation of user behavior (and thus, of the load induced on the video serv ers) have been presented in the literature. Only a fe w of these models are designed to take long-term effects into account because the basis for most of the models are short-term influences on a single video server and the load on this single machine. In this paper we describe a new user behavior model and show that various assumptions made within other models are unrealistic.

Long-term movie popularity models in video-on-demand systems: or the life of an on-demand movie

Future interactive television applications are the upcoming front-end to interactive radio, television, video rental, home shopping, multimedia communication, and information retrieval. The challenge of an interactive television system is not that the medium is digital, nor the ability of browsing media resources, nor reception of multiple kinds of media. Users do not need more information than today. The colleague is to provide information which corresponds to users' interests and needs. This paper describes the vision of a multimedia iTV system whose appearance is personally adapted for each user. The concept personal iTV systems is presented by explaining the task of personalization and the technical fundamentals of intelligent assistance.

Intelligent media agents in interactive television systems

1. ABSTRACT Various on-demand systems require that large numbers of customers are provided with the same multimedia stream content or different but closely related content in short temporary sequence but not at exactly the same time. This includes video on demand and news on demand. A typical approach to increase the performance of such systems is caching. However in current commercial on-demand streaming applications in the Internet caches are used very rarely because a mechanism to protect the content from resale by the cache owners does not exist. A typical solution is to transfer all content via protected unicast transmissions, which is an approach that does not scale. We want to present a trivial scheme that provides similar protection for the content but be used efficiently with multicasting and caching. In this approach, the major part of the video is intentionally corrupted and can be distributed via multicast connections, while the part for reconstruction of the original is delivered to each receiver individually. We propose also means to discourage resale of the multimedia content by customers. One proposal introduces receiver-sided introduction of watermarks into the video, the other uses infrequent corrupt bytes to achieve uniqueness of each copy.

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Protecting VoD the easier way

Streaming video over the Internet requires mechanisms that limit the streams' bandwidth consumption within its fair share. TCP streaming guarantees this and provides lossless streaming as a side-effect. Adaptation by packet drop does not occur in the network, and excessive startup latency and stalling must be prevented by adapting the bandwidth consumption of the video itself. However, when the adaptation is performed during an ongoing session, it may influence the perceived quality of the entire video and result in improved or reduced visual quality of experience. We have investigated visual artifacts that are caused by adaptive layer switching -- we call them flicker effects -- and present our results for handheld devices in this paper. We considered three types of flicker, namely noise, blur and motion flicker. The perceptual impact of flicker is explored through subjective assessments. We vary both the intensity of quality changes (amplitude) and the number of quality changes per second (frequency). Users' ability to detect and their acceptance of variations in the amplitudes and frequencies of the quality changes are explored across four content types. Our results indicate that multiple factors influence the acceptance of different quality variations. Amplitude plays the dominant role in delivering satisfactory video quality, while frequency can also be adjusted to relieve the annoyance of flicker artifacts.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Tiling in Interactive Panoramic Video: Approaches and Evaluation

Long-term movie popularity models in video-on-demand systems: or the life of an on-demand movie

Intelligent media agents in interactive television systems

Protecting VoD the easier way

Flicker effects in adaptive video streaming to handheld devices