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

General-purpose CPUs with multiple cores are established products, and new heterogeneous technology like the Cell broadband engine and general-purpose GPUs bring an even higher degree of true multi-processing into the market. However, means for utilizing the processing power is immature. Current tools typically assume that exclusive use of these resources is sufficient, but this assumption will soon be invalid because the interest in using their processing power for general-purpose tasks. Among the applications that can benefit from such technology is transcoding support for distributed media applications, where remote participants join and leave dynamically. Transcoding consists of several clearly separated processing operations that consume a lot of resources, such that individual processing units are unable to handle all operations of a session of arbitrary size. The individual operations can then be distributed over several processing units, and data must be moved between them according to the dependencies between operations. Many multi-processor scheduling approaches exist, but to the best of our knowledge, a challenge is still to find mechanisms that can schedule dynamic workloads of communicating operations while taking both the processing and communication requirements into account. For such applications, we believe that feasible scheduling can be performed in two levels, i.e., divided into the task of placing a job onto a processing unit and the task of multitasking time-slices within a single processing unit. We have implemented some simple high-level scheduling mechanisms and simulated a video conferencing scenario running on topologies inspired by existing systems from Intel, AMD, IBM and nVidia. Our results show the importance of using an efficient high-level scheduler.

Evaluation of multi-core scheduling mechanisms for heterogeneous processing architectures

Supporting thousands of interacting players in a virtual world poses huge challenges with respect to processing. Existing work that addresses the challenge utilizes a variety of spatial partitioning algorithms to distribute the load. If, however, a large number of players needs to interact tightly across an area of the game world, spatial partitioning cannot subdivide this area without incurring massive communication costs, latency or inconsistency. It is a major challenge of game engines to scale such areas to the largest number of players possible, in a deviation from earlier thinking, parallelism on multi-core architectures is applied to increase scalability. In this paper, we evaluate the design and implementation of our game server architecture, called LEARS, which allows for lock-free parallel processing of a single spatial partition by considering every game cycle an atomic tick. %We also discuss challenges that arise as different %dependency requirements are introduced to the system. Our prototype is evaluated using traces from live game sessions where we measure the server response time for all objects that need timely updates. We also measure how the response time for the multi-threaded implementation varies with the number of threads used. Our results show that the challenge of scaling up a game-server can be an embarrassingly parallel problem.

LEARS: A Lockless, Relaxed-Atomicity State Model for Parallel Execution of a Game Server Partition

Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) have strin|gent latency requirements and must support large numbers of concurrent players. To handle these conflicting requirements, it is common to divide the virtual environment into virtual regions, and spawn multiple instances of isolated game areas (known as dungeons or instances) to serve multiple distnct groups of players. As MMOGs attract players from all around the world, it is plausible to disperse these regions and instances on georgraphically distributed servers. Core selection algorithms can then be applied to locate an optimal server for placing a region or instance, based on player latencies. Functionality for migrating objects supports this objective, with a distributed name server ensuring that references to the moved objects are efficiently maintained. As a result, we anticipate a decrease in aggregate latency for the affected players. With Ginnungagap we present the implementation and evaluation of a middleware that combines these ideas and present its feasibility.

Evaluating Ginnungagap: a middleware for migration of partial game-state utilizing core-selection for latency reduction

The end-to-end distribution of real-time 360-degree video needs to be evaluated in a wholesome manner, considering all aspects from video capture to encoding, delivery, and playback, as well as timely and appropriate analytics, with a focus on end-user Quality of Experience (QoE). This requires a measurement framework which allows for the collection of metrics from multiple dimensions at the same time. In this work, we propose such a framework for evaluating real-time adaptive 360\degree video streaming over an experimental Fifth Generation (5G) network, which allows for the investigation of different aspects of the end-to-end video delivery chain.

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Evaluation Framework for Real-Time Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming over 5G Networks

Quality of service guarantees for multimedia communication systems have been considered on several abstraction levels. In the multimedia networking field it is typical to identify the minimal QoS requirements of an application to save resources by guaranteeing its functionality. Many of these applications can operate in spite of an imperfect delivery of media data, while other applications such as distributed databases or distributed file systems consider perfect QoS necessary but accept delay. The basic problems of the latter is the consistency of their data, while the former require a consistent perception of the content. More generically, both QoS requirements can be interpreted as a problem of maintaining a consistent system state. Consequently we assume that many distributed applications, including most distributed multimedia applications, can fulfil their tasks in spite of imperfect consistency. Since the application requirements differ widely, the elements that make up "consistency" must be separated and classified. This paper introduces Consistency QoS and proposes a classification of elements that determine an application's consistency requirements. The low level QoS requirements that these separate parameters rely on are shown, and example parameter sets for application classes are given.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7431/20212/00933986.pdf

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Evaluation of multi-core scheduling mechanisms for heterogeneous processing architectures

LEARS: A Lockless, Relaxed-Atomicity State Model for Parallel Execution of a Game Server Partition

Evaluating Ginnungagap: a middleware for migration of partial game-state utilizing core-selection for latency reduction

Evaluation Framework for Real-Time Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming over 5G Networks

Perceived consistency