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 type of Internet services that have recently gained much attention are services that enable people around the world to communicate in real-time. Such services of real-time interaction are offered by applications most commonly referred to as distributed interactive applications. Concrete examples of distributed interactive applications are multiplayer online games, audio/video conferencing, and many virtual-reality applications linked to education, entertainment, military, etc. A time-dependent requirement generally applies to all distributed interactive applications that aim to support real-time interaction, and is usually in terms of a few hundred milliseconds. The latency requirements are manifested in terms of event-distribution, group membership management, group dynamics, etc., far exceeding the requirements of many other applications.

Group communication techniques in overlay networks

This paper investigates several aspects of streaming in News-on-Demand services on the Internet by analyzing log files of a news service from Norway?s largest online newspaper. We investigate both short and long term effects of client usage of the service. By comparing our results with earlier work, we found that variations in server load depend strongly on local culture. Furthermore, we found that there are slight variations between client usage of the audio and video material.

Analysis of Server Workload and Client Interactions in a News-on-Demand Streaming System

The problem of overbuffering in today's Internet (termed as bufferbloat) has recently drawn a great amount of attention from the research community. This has led to the development of various active queue management (AQM) schemes. The last years have seen a lot of effort to show the benefits of AQMs over simple tail-drop queuing and to encourage deployment. Yet it is still unknown to what extent AQMs are deployed in the Internet. In this paper, we present an end-to-end active measurement method to detect AQMs on the path bottleneck. We have developed an active measurement tool, named \emph{TADA}, and evaluated our measurement methodology on a controlled experimental testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides the basis to identify whether an AQM is deployed on the bottleneck.

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TADA: An Active Measurement Tool for Automatic Detection of AQM

There are many scenarios where high resolution, wide field of view video is useful. Such panorama video may be generated using camera arrays where the feeds from multiple cameras pointing at different parts of the captured area are stitched together. However, processing the different steps of a panorama video pipeline in real-time is challenging due to the high data rates and the stringent timeliness requirements. In our research, we use panorama video in a sport analysis system called Bagadus. This system is deployed at Alfheim stadium in Tromso, and due to live usage, the video events must be generated in real-time. In this paper, we describe our real-time panorama system built using a low-cost CCD HD video camera array. We describe how we have implemented different components and evaluated alternatives. The performance results from experiments ran on commodity hardware with and without co-processors like graphics processing units (GPUs) show that the entire pipeline is able to run in real-time.

Processing Panorama Video in Real-time

On-demand access to remote multimedia content via the Internet is becoming increasingly popular. Applications like video on demand and news on demand are increasingly based on structured multimedia presentations, which give users more options and freedom to interact with the content than just VCR-like operations. For example, authors provide multiple choices for parts of the presentation and the user can select the most interesting one. Distributing such presentations in hierarchical distribution systems comprised of origin server and proxies can lead to new challenges for proxies since entire presentations are large but only small parts of them are actually consumed by each user. We have analyzed this problem for interactive presentations encoded in MPEG-4 and found that we can use the internal structure of MPEG-4 objects to improve performance in a distribution system based on proxy caching.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Group communication techniques in overlay networks

Analysis of Server Workload and Client Interactions in a News-on-Demand Streaming System

TADA: An Active Measurement Tool for Automatic Detection of AQM

Processing Panorama Video in Real-time

Caching of interactive multiple choice MPEG-4 presentations