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

We welcome you to the fourth ACM Multimedia Systems conference (MMSys). This conference focuses on multimedia computing and networking, lying at the intersection of digital media and the systems (applications, architectures, networking, operating systems) that handle them. The goal is to cut across a diverse set of computer science subfields in order to achieve a longitudinal perspective on the challenges that multimedia data types present. This provides a unique opportunity to view the intersections and interplay of the various approaches and solutions developed across these domains to deal with multimedia data types. Furthermore, MMSys provides an avenue for communicating research that addresses multimedia systems holistically.

Proceedings of the 4th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference

Scalable video is an attractive option for adapting the bandwidth consumption of streaming video to the available bandwidth. Fine-grained scalability can adapt most closely to the available bandwidth, but this comes at the cost of a higher overhead compared to more coarse-grained videos. In the context of VoD streaming, we have therefore explored whether a similar adaptation to the available bandwidth can be achieved by performing layer switching in coarse-grained scalable videos. In this approach, enhancement layers of a video stream are switched on and off to achieve any desired longer term bandwidth. We have performed three user studies, two using mobile devices and one using an HDTV display, to evaluate the idea. In several cases, the far-from-obvious conclusion is that layer switching is a viable way of achieving bit-rate savings and fine-grained bit-rate adaptation even for rather short times between layer switches, but it does, however, depend on scaling dimensions, content and display device.

Frequent layer switching for perceived quality improvements of coarse-grained scalable video

When trying to build an audio/video (AV) streaming infrastructure one realizes that some functionality is needed in several parts of the application. E.g., in case of video server and client, protocols like RTP/RTCP, RTSP and SDP are needed in both parts. Therefore it is appropriate to implement these functions in a reusable manner and to create a well-defined and documented API for each module. To use the infrastructure in projects with non-research groups, it is necessary to support several decoders and several video servers for the diverse encoding formats (e .g .H.263, MPEG-1, QuickTime). These come with different APIs, leading to an adaptation effort whenever a new library is integrated. While such abstractions are typical for streaming applications, a generic structure like that of the JMF is rarely found in free, open source systems. Existing approaches implement either hard-coded sequences, or they consider frameworks that allow the specification of an end-to-end behavior for complex multimedia systems. In the latter kind of systems, functionality is described at the level of cooperating distributed components [1, 2]. It is typical for such frameworks to consider networking as a component that is also under the control of the framework. In an environment that ensures interoperability by specifying protocols (such as the RTSP streaming environment), we prefer a local approach. The control of our framework extends only over a single machine and RTSP is used explicitly for communication. Due to the interaction of RTP and RTCE and the possibility of receiving data from several sources at a single port, a directed, non-cyclic graph of modules is an appropriate streaming model. In case of RTP, an infrastructure is appropriate only if dynamic reconfiguration of the data path is supported by the modules as well as the controlling framework. A packet that arrives at an interface from an unexpected sender must be handled in an application-defined way: it may be appropriate to discard the packet, to assign it to a default path, or to create an additional stream for special processing.

Dynamic data path reconfiguration

Cloud Gaming is an emerging service that catches growing interest in the research community as well as industry. While the paradigm shift from a game execution on clients to streaming games from the cloud offers a variety of benefits, the new services also 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 frustration of players. 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 users. In addition, an expert evaluation methodology to quantify these characteristics, as well as a delay sensitivity classification based on a decision tree is presented. The ratings of 14 experts for the quantification indicated an excellent level of agreement which demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method. Additionally, the decision tree reached an accuracy of 86.6 % 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

COVID-19 has changed our lives and continues to have a drastic impact. It forces us to impose restrictive social distancing measures and leads us to rely more on the Internet. Mobile networks become one of the major means to access the Internet for most of us. We investigate the performance of 9 mobile networks in Europe around the time when restrictions were imposed, considering web QoE, throughput, RTT, and signal coverage. Our results show countries' mobile networks are impacted by COVID-19 (as high as 46 % increase in page load time) at different times based on the outbreak timelines in these countries. Moreover, we find that operators responded properly and the network performance is back to the pre-COVID-19 times.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Proceedings of the 4th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference

Frequent layer switching for perceived quality improvements of coarse-grained scalable video

Dynamic data path reconfiguration

Delay Sensitivity Classification of Cloud Gaming Content

Mobile Network Performance during the COVID-19 Outbreak from a Testbed Perspective