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

Mobile ad-hoc networks are typically very dynamic networks in terms of available communication partners, network resources, connectivity, etc. Furthermore, the end-user devices are very heterogeneous, ranging from high-end laptops to low-end PDAs and mobile phones. Traditionally, middleware is used to abstract from this heterogeneity and to enable the application programmer to focus on application issues. We propose to develop middleware services that additionally provide services for information sharing in mobile ad-hoc networks, because the possibility to share information is mission critical for many mobile ad-hoc network applications.

Towards middleware services for mobile ad-hoc network applications

Scalable video is an attractive option for adapting the bandwidth consumption of streaming video to the available bandwidth. Fine-grained scalability can adapt most closely to the available bandwidth, but this comes at the cost of a high compression penalty. In the context of VoD streaming to mobile end systems, we have therefore explored whether a similar adaptation to the available bandwidth can be achieved by performing layer switching in coarse-grained scalable videos. In this approach, enhancement layers of a video stream are switched on and off to achieve any desired longer-term bandwidth. We performed user studies to evaluate the idea, and came to the far-from-obvious conclusion that layer switching is viable way for bit-rate savings and fine-grained bit-rate adaptation even for rather short times between layer switches.

Fine-grained scalable streaming from coarse-grained videos

With the increasing deployment of wireless technologies, such as WLAN, HSDPA, and WiMAX, it is often the case that simultaneous coverage of several access networks is available to a single user device. In addition, devices are also often equipped with multiple network interfaces. Thus, if we can exploit all available network interfaces at the same time, we can obtain advantages like the aggregation of bandwidth and increased fault tolerance. However, the heterogeneity and dynamics of the links also introduce challenges. Due to different link delays, sending packets of the same flow over multiple heterogeneous paths causes the reordering of packets.

An analysis of the heterogeneity and IP packet reordering over multiple wireless networks

While cloud servers provide a tremendous amount of resources for networked video applications, most successful stories of cloud-assisted video applications are presentational video services, such as YouTube and NetFlix. This article surveys the recent advances on delay-sensitive video computations in the cloud, which are crucial to cloud-assisted conversational video services, such as cloud gaming, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and telepresence. Supporting conversational video services with cloud resources is challenging because most cloud servers are far away from the end users while these services incur the following stringent requirements: high bandwidth, short delay, and high heterogeneity. In this article, we cover the literature with a top-down approach: from applications and experience, to architecture and management, and to optimization in and outside of the cloud. We also point out major open challenges, hoping to stimulate more research activities in this emerging and exciting direction.

Delay-Sensitive Video Computing in the Cloud: A Survey

Analysis of medical videos for detection of abnormalities like lesions and diseases requires both high precision and recall but also real-time processing for live feedback during standard colonoscopies and scalability for massive population based screening, which can be done using a capsular video endoscope. Existing related work in this field does not provide the necessary combination of detection accuracy and performance. In this paper, a multimedia system is presented where the aim is to tackle automatic analysis of videos from the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The system includes the whole pipeline from data collection, processing and analysis, to visualization. The system combines filters using machine learning, image recognition and extraction of global and local image features, and it is built in a modular way, so that it can easily be extended. At the same time, it is developed for efficient processing in order to provide real-time feedback to the doctor. Initial experiments show that our system has detection and localisation accuracy at least as good as existing systems, but it stands out in terms of real-time performance and low resource consumption for scalability.

Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Towards middleware services for mobile ad-hoc network applications

Fine-grained scalable streaming from coarse-grained videos

An analysis of the heterogeneity and IP packet reordering over multiple wireless networks

Delay-Sensitive Video Computing in the Cloud: A Survey

EIR — Efficient computer aided diagnosis framework for gastrointestinal endoscopies