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

Energy efficiency is a timely topic for modern mobile computing. Reducing the energy consumption of devices not only increases their battery lifetime, but also reduces the risk of hardware failure. Many researchers strive to understand the relationship between software activity and hardware power usage. A recurring strategy for saving power is to reduce operating frequencies. It is widely acknowledged that standard frequency scaling algorithms generally overreact to changes in hardware utilisation. More recent and original efforts attempt to balance software workloads on heterogeneous multicore architectures, such as the Tegra K1, which includes a quad-core CPU and a CUDA-capable GPU. However, it is not known whether it is possible to utilise these processor elements in parallel to save energy. Research into these types of systems are unfortunately often evaluated with the Performance Per Watt (PPW) metric, which is an unaccurate method because it ignores constant power usage from idle components. We show that this metric can end up increase energy usage on the Tegra K1, and give a false impression of how such systems consume energy. In reality, we show that it is much harder to save energy by balancing workloads between the heterogeneous cores of the Tegra K1, where we demonstrate only a 5% energy saving by offloading 10% DCT workload from the GPU to the CPU. Significantly more energy can be saved (up to 50 %) using the appropriate processor for different workloads.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3083187.3083195

Load Balancing of Multimedia Workloads for Energy Efficiency on the Tegra K1 Multicore Architecture

Les salles de cinema sont passees a l’ere numerique. Pour la distribution des copies numeriques de films, la Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) a choisi d’encoder les films au format Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Notre activite est menee en collaboration avec les cinemas Utopia, qui forment un reseau de salles independantes. La principale exigence d’Utopia est de fournir des logiciels libres et gratuits pour le cinema numerique. Le format DCP utilise la compression JPEG2000 pour la video, en raison de son taux de compression eleve pour les grandes images. Realiser une implementation efficace de codage et de decodage de ce format est complexe. Neanmoins, nous proposons une implementation amelioree du decodage pour la projection dans les salles obscures. Les equipements actuellement deployes dans les salles sont chers a l’achat et ont un cout de maintenance eleve, ce qui empeche les petites salles independantes de s’equiper. Notre but est de proposer une solution logicielle adaptee a la projection des DCP. Cet article presente une solution qui realise le decodage en temps reel et la projection, en s’appuyant sur des outils multimedia libres et standards comme le lecteur VLC et les bibliotheques libav/ffmpeg. Nous presentons les ameliorations implementees dans VLC pour supporter les DCP, qui incluent la lecture des fichiers et la synchronisation entre audio et video. Nous detaillons ensuite la realisation du decodeur JPEG2000 dans libav/ffmpeg. Pour finir, nous evaluons les performances de lecture atteintes.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01137253/document

Lecture de DCP pour le cinéma numérique avec le lecteur multimédia VLC et libav/ffmpeg

There is an increasing trend to include streamed video data in 3D environments. Such environments allow potentially several concurrently visible videos on a single display device, and consequently, network and processing bottlenecks. As a first step towards an avoidance of such problems, we have performed subjective assessments using a 3D application prototype to determine how positioning of video in the 3D environment influences the user perception of reduced-quality videos. Using video clips from several genres, we have compared the influence of various ways to reduce video quality and users' perception of degraded quality. We evaluated the influence of distance and angle of the placement.

Video streaming into virtual worlds: the effects of virtual screen distance and angle on perceived quality

In this article, we evaluate the performance effects of I-O bound workloads on a specific virtual machine, an important component of an enterprise cloud computing infrastructure In particular, we demonstrate that (1) the I-O workload of one guest system may adversely affect the I-O performance of another for the XEN hypervisor and (2) the general I-O performance is degraded due to various overheads Next, we have devised a light-weight, complementary, backwards-compatible alternative to hypervisor-based virtualization techniques called BONSAI Our software provides low-overhead I-O performance isolation by transparently applying traffic shaping to system calls in a cost-effective manner Using this system, I-O resource consumption can be controlled at a very fine granularity Furthermore, using video streaming experiments, where we limit the I-O bandwidth available to each service, we show that we are able to achieve the required level of resource isolation on a per process basis with only a negligible CPU overhead and without reducing the I-O performance Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Support for enterprise consolidation of I-O bound services

Crowdsourced and remote user studies have recently gained popularity as alternatives to traditional laboratory studies. However, they are subject to unreliability, and it is challenging to ensure that valid results are collected, especially when conducting user studies with experts. Experts are a sparse resource, usually having busy schedules and heavy workloads, and are not necessarily geographically close. They are therefore often unwilling to participate in studies which require physical attendance. In this paper, we compare three alternative methods: crowd sourced user study with non-experts, remote user study with non-experts, and remote user study with domain experts, for a use case involving investigative child interview training. We present the results from three subjective studies about the perception of AI-generated child avatars, which is developed using various technologies such as dialogue models, game engine, text-to-speech and speech-to-text components. The study was conducted with three different user groups, and our results indicate the importance of using best practice measures for ensuring the collection of reliable results in crowdsourced settings as compared to remote studies, and highlight the difference between the perspectives of domain experts and non-experts.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Load Balancing of Multimedia Workloads for Energy Efficiency on the Tegra K1 Multicore Architecture

Lecture de DCP pour le cinéma numérique avec le lecteur multimédia VLC et libav/ffmpeg

Video streaming into virtual worlds: the effects of virtual screen distance and angle on perceived quality

Support for enterprise consolidation of I-O bound services

Comparison of Crowdsourced and Remote Subjective User Studies: A Case Study of Investigative Child Interviews