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 propose a QoE-based analysis approach for real-time adaptive 360-degree video streaming measurements, focusing on the correlation between objective video metrics and subjective end-user scores.

Poster: QoE-Based Analysis of Real-Time Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming

Processing data intensive multimedia workloads is challenging, and scheduling and resource management are vitally important for the best possible utilization of machine resources. In earlier work, we have used work-stealing, which is frequently used today, and proposed improvements. We found already then that no singular work-stealing variant is ideally suited for all workloads. Therefore, we investigate in more detail in this paper how workloads consisting of various multimedia filter sequences should be scheduled on a variety of modern processor architectures to maximize performance. Our results show that a low-level scheduler additionally cannot achieve optimal performance without taking the specific micro-architecture, the placement of dependent tasks and cache sizes into account. These details are not generally available for application developers and they differ between deployments. Our proposal is therefore to use performance monitoring and dynamic adaption for the cyclic workloads of our target multimedia scenario, where operations are repeated cyclically on a stream of data.

Low-Level Scheduling Implications for Data-Intensive Cyclic Workloads on Modern Microarchitectures

Subjective user studies are important to ensure the fidelity and usability of systems that generate multimedia content. Testing how end-users and domain experts perceive multimedia assets might provide crucial information. In this paper, we present our experiences with the open source hybrid crowdsourced-remote user survey framework called Huldra, which is intended for conducting web-based subjective user studies and aims to integrate the individual benefits associated with traditional, crowdsourced, and remote methods. We disseminate our experiences and insights from two actively deployed use cases and discuss challenges and opportunities associated with using Huldra as a framework for conducting user studies.

Experiences and Lessons Learned from a Crowdsourced-Remote Hybrid User Survey Framework

This paper presents our approach for the Context of Multimedia Experience Task of the MediaEval 2016 Benchmark. We present different analyses of the given data using different subsets of data sources and combinations of it. Our approach gives a baseline evaluation indicating that metadata approaches work well but that also visual features can provide useful information for the given problem to solve.

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Simula @ MediaEval 2016 Context of Experience Task.

The growing power of processors allows us to implement increasingly complex multimedia algorithms. However, this processor power is only available if the algorithms are implemented in a way that exploits the multi-core parallelism of these processors. Today, this requires that the skillsets required for algorithm development and for parallel programming are tightly combined to achieve this.By providing a language, compiler and runtime that allows algorithm developers to specify algorithms as a series of data-transforming kernels written in C++, while the parallelization opportunities are built into the compiler and runtime, we hope to alleviate this need for a dual skillset.In this paper, we focus on the performance improvements that our system can achieve by combining language design, compiler knowledge, and runtime decisions to overcome performance bottlenecks from fine-grained kernel scheduling and cache-line contention without adapting the algorithms they implement.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Poster: QoE-Based Analysis of Real-Time Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming

Low-Level Scheduling Implications for Data-Intensive Cyclic Workloads on Modern Microarchitectures

Experiences and Lessons Learned from a Crowdsourced-Remote Hybrid User Survey Framework

Simula @ MediaEval 2016 Context of Experience Task.

A logical memory model for scaling parallel multimedia workloads