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

In this demo, we present Bagadus, a prototype of a soccer analysis application which integrates a sensor system, soccer analytics annotations and video processing of a video camera array. The prototype is currently installed at Alfheim Stadium in Norway, and we demonstrate how the system can follow and zoom in on particular player(s), and playout events from the games using the stitched panorama video and/or the camera switching mode.

Demo: Bagadus an integrated system for soccer analysis

Time-dependent applications using TCP often send thin-stream traffic, characterised by small packets and high inter-transmission-times. Retransmissions after packet loss can result in very high delays for such flows as they often cannot trigger fast retransmit. Redundant Data Bundling is a mechanism that preempts the experience of loss for a flow by piggybacking unacknowledged segments with new data as long as the total packet size is lower than the flow maximum segment size. Although successful at reducing retransmission latency, this mechanism had design issues leaving it open for abuse, effectively making it unsuitable for general Internet deployment. In this paper, we have redesigned the RDB mechanism to make it safe for deployment. We improve the trigger for when to apply it and evaluate its fairness towards competing traffic. Extensive experimental results confirm that our proposed modifications allows for inter-flow fairness while maintaining the significant latency reductions from the original RDB mechanism.

/pdf/latency-and-fairness-trade-off-for-thin-streams-using-1llakg8vuy.pdf

Latency and fairness trade-off for thin streams using redundant data bundling in TCP

INF5070 - Media Storage and Distribution Systems:

One of the most difficult tasks when creating an online multi-player game is to provide the players with a consistent view of the virtual world despite the network delays. Most current games use prediction algorithms to achieve this, however measuring the effect of different approaches is difficult. To solve this problem we introduce a simulator called GLS that gives us a fully controlled environment and allows large-scale experiments to evaluate different aspects of the algorithms.

GLS: simulator for online multi-player games

Data-bundling is a useful technique that decreases the delivery delay of packet streams when they are transmitted over noisy channels and are subject to retransmission-based error control. In this paper, we investigate the packet delay statistics for a fully reliable selective repeat automatic repeat request (SR ARQ) where a data-bundling mechanism is employed. In more detail, we discuss a model for data-bundling to analyze the SR ARQ mechanism over wireless channels based on Markov chains. We evaluate various channel error distributions and analyze the buffer occupancy to check if the data-bundling mechanism provides efficient results. We further analyze the queueing, delivery and overall delay statistics at link layer. We found that using data-bundling can improve the delay performance of the SR ARQ mechanism, especially when bursty channels with heavily correlated errors are considered. Thus, this technique can bring useful improvements for real-time services, multimedia, and other delay-sensitive applications over wireless networks.

/pdf/analysis-of-sr-arq-delays-using-data-bundling-over-markov-2i5590bwhr.pdf

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Demo: Bagadus an integrated system for soccer analysis

Latency and fairness trade-off for thin streams using redundant data bundling in TCP

INF5070 - Media Storage and Distribution Systems:

GLS: simulator for online multi-player games

Analysis of SR ARQ delays using data-bundling over Markov channels