Showing papers in "IEEE MultiMedia in 2001"

Detecting LSB steganography in color, and gray-scale images

Abstract: We describe a reliable and accurate method for detecting least significant bit (LSB) nonsequential embedding in digital images. The secret message length is derived by inspecting the lossless capacity in the LSB and shifted LSB plane. An upper bound of 0.005 bits per pixel was experimentally determined for safe LSB embedding.

Web engineering: an introduction

Abstract: Within a short period, the Internet and World Wide Web have become ubiquitous, surpassing all other technological developments in our history. They've also grown rapidly in their scope and extent of use, significantly affecting all aspects of our lives. Industries such as manufacturing, travel and hospitality, banking, education, and government are Web-enabled to improve and enhance their operations. E-commerce has expanded quickly, cutting across national boundaries. Even traditional legacy information and database systems have migrated to the Web. Advances in wireless technologies and Web-enabled appliances are triggering a new wave of mobile Web applications. As a result, we increasingly depend on a range of Web applications. Now that many of us rely on Web based systems and applications, they need to be reliable and perform well. To build these systems and applications, Web developers need a sound methodology, a disciplined and repeatable process, better development tools, and a set of good guidelines. The emerging field of Web engineering fulfils these needs. It uses scientific, engineering, and management principles and systematic approaches to successfully develop, deploy, and maintain high-quality Web systems and applications. It aims to bring the current chaos in Web based system development under control, minimize risks, and enhance Web site maintainability and quality.

Conceptual modeling of device-independent Web applications

Abstract: Existing tools for building and deploying complex Web sites are inadequate for dealing with the software production process that involves connecting with underlying logic in a unified and systematic way. As a solution, we propose the OO-H method, an object-oriented software approach that captures relevant properties involved in modeling and implementing Web application interfaces.

A survey of multimedia and Web development techniques and methodology usage

Abstract: The authors present survey results which suggest that no uniform approach exists for multimedia systems development and that practitioners are not using the multimedia models cited in the literature. It is concluded that developers need new techniques that capture requirements and integrate them within a systems development framework.

Semantic annotation and transcoding: making Web content more accessible

Abstract: We propose a method for constructing superstructure on the Web using XML and external annotations to Web documents. We have three approaches for annotating documents: linguistic, commentary, and multimedia. The result is annotated documents that computers can understand and process more easily, allowing content to reach a wider audience with minimal overhead.

Web metrics - estimating design and authoring effort

Abstract: Like any software process, Web application development would benefit from early-stage effort estimates. Using an undergraduate university course as a case study, we collected metrics corresponding to Web applications, developers and tools. Then we used those metrics to generate models for predicting design and authoring effort for future Web applications.

Understanding and restructuring Web sites with ReWeb

Abstract: The authors investigated automatic and semiautomatic Web site analysis with our tool ReWeb, focusing on a site's architecture and evolution. A case study demonstrates how ReWeb addresses the need to support Web site maintenance and evolution while retaining and possibly improving quality. Although not definitive, the case study described confirms that an automatic or semiautomatic tool can help developers understand and maintain Web sites. High-level views, describing the overall site architecture, are very useful, and detailed analyses can help with a site's enclosed subparts. Specifically, we based restructuring on the reaching frames, dominators, and shortest path analyses. In fact, they highlight structural and navigation problems before restructuring and their absence after the intervention. We devote future work to improving the ReWeb's robustness, widening the spectrum of analyzable sites, and enriching its set of analyses and facilities. We would also like to add abstraction techniques to support a high-level view of the site and to partially automate input selection in the presence of dynamic pages.

Computational media aesthetics: finding meaning beautiful

Abstract: Content management's future is bright. Innovative media management, annotation, delivery, and navigation services will enrich online shopping, help-desk services, and anytime-anywhere training over wireless devices. Semantics-based annotations will break the traditional linear manner of accessing and browsing media and will support vignette-oriented access of audio and video. This can lead to new offerings of customized media management utilities for various market segments such as online education and training, advertising, news networks, and broadcasting studios. However, the semantic gap between the rich meaning that users want when they query and browse media and the shallowness of the content descriptions that we can actually compute is weakening today's automatic content-annotation systems. This is a crucial obstacle that we must overcome to achieve that bright future. A serious need exists to develop algorithms and technologies that can annotate content with deep semantics and establish semantic connections between media's form and function, for the first time letting users access indexed media and navigate content in unforeseeable and surprising ways. To address these underlying problems,, we advocate an approach that markedly departs from existing methods' based on detecting and annotating low-level audio-visual features. To go beyond representing what a video or movie directly shows, we postulate that we must analyze and interpret the content's visual, aural, and emotional impact. Our contention is that we must understand compositional and aesthetic media principles to guide content analysis.

Web engineering: creating a discipline among disciplines

Abstract: Web engineering is a discipline among disciplines, cutting across computer science, information systems, and software engineering, as well as benefiting from several non-IT specializations. Intertwining so many disciplines presents a unique problem for organization and development. The authors discuss Web engineering's classification, define its characteristics, and contrast its present issues with previous problems in information technology.

Engineering Web applications for reuse

Abstract: Web design frameworks combine generic conceptual, navigational, and context schemas. Such frameworks offer developers a conceptual approach to maximize design reuse rather than code reuse in Web applications. The authors apply the object oriented hypermedia design extension, OOHDM-Frame, to determine key architectural components and design structures that lend themselves to reuse.

The essence of web engineering - managing the diversity and complexity of web application development

Abstract: lthough everything has progressed rapidly in the Internet and Web arena, nothing has changed significantly in the way that most people develop Web sites and applications. Web-based systems and applications now deliver a complex array of content and functionality to many heterogeneous end users, and this trend will continue. Unfortunately, however, the practices that developers follow for Web application development today are as poor as they were when the Web was in its infancy. Many organizations and developers have successfully developed large, high-performance Web sites and applications, but others have failed or face the potential for major failures. The primary causes of these failures are a lack of vision, shortsighted goals, a flawed design and development process, and poor management of development efforts—not technology. The way we address these concerns is critical to realizing the Web's full potential. The new Web engineering discipline deals with the process of developing Web-based systems and applications. The essence of Web engineering is to successfully manage the diversity and complexity of Web application development, and hence, to avoid potential failures that can have serious implications. (For a brief introduction to Web engineering see our earlier article. 1) This issue concludes our two-part theme on Web engineering. Part 1, which appeared in the January–March 2001 issue, 2 gives an overview on Web engineering and how it's helping practitioners develop and maintain high-quality Web systems and applications. It presents a Web design framework that facilitates application reuse, an object-oriented approach to legacy integration, a tool for constructing Web documents with visual simulations, Web metrics, and a case study highlighting experiences in developing flexible Web services. This issue further explores Web-based systems development and practices and presents multidisciplinary perspectives that help shape this dynamic area of Internet and Web application development. Web application development In many cases, it's not possible to specify fully what a Web site should or will contain at the start of the development process, because its structure and functionality will evolve over time. Furthermore, the information contained within and presented by a Web site will also change. Thus, the ability to maintain information and scale the Web site's structure (and the functions it provides) are two major factors that should be considered when developing a Web site. These factors make Web application development different from traditional software development. Need for a process To better manage Web-based systems design and development, and to do …

Experiences in engineering flexible Web services

Abstract: The life-cycle of a World Wide Web service includes analysis, design, implementation and maintenance stages. Our experiences in building and maintaining the annual Vienna International Festival's Web site have led us to create engineering tools that cover all these phases.

SMIL 2.0 part 1: overview, concepts, and structure

Abstract: The World Wide Web Consortium's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language format for encoding multimedia presentations for delivery over the Web is a little-known but widely used standard. First released in mid-1998, SMIL has been installed on approximately 200,000,000 desktops worldwide, primarily because of its adoption in RealPlayer G2, Quicktime 4.1, and Internet Explorer 5.5. In August 2001, the W3C released a significant update with SMIL 2.0. In a two-part report on SMIL 2.0, the author will discuss the basics of SMIL 2.0 and compare its features with other formats. This article will focus on SMIL's basic concepts and structure. Part two, in the January-March 2002 issue, will look at detailed examples of SMIL 2.0, covering both simple and complex examples. It'll also contrast the facilities in SMIL 2.0 and MPEG-4.

Protocols for watermark verification

Abstract: In current digital watermarking schemes used to deter piracy of multimedia content, the owner typically reveals the watermark in the process of establishing piracy. Once revealed, a watermark can be removed. We eliminate this limitation by using cryptographic protocols to demonstrate the presence of a watermark without revealing it.

Play the game [multimedia research]

Abstract: Children easily cope with the technology and user interfaces of games. For them, digital entertainment is a fact of life, not some futuristic dream. Moreover, their experiences with entertainment technology shape their expectations for digital media-based technology. The author considers why the advances in games and digital entertainment are or seem to be swifter than in multimedia research. It seems that the underlying question behind the development effort is different. In digital entertainment, the customer is king. Developers constantly assess who their customers are and whether their products meet consumers' needs. Multimedia researchers, however, seem to focus on how to solve a particular problem and ignore the real-world applicability part of the equation. Perhaps we should play computer games more often and put ourselves in the consumers' seat to find out what is happening out there.

Metadata standards for Web-based resources

Abstract: One problem with all metadata approaches is that they try to be specialized and generic, so they are useful for different scenarios. While the languages for encoding and exchanging the metadata are already available, it will take more time for the industry to agree on a shared vocabulary for the metadata elements and values. Another problem with metadata is supporting all the different user roles that are involved during a resource's production and distribution. Future authoring systems will be able to automatically generate many metadata values and will offer user-friendly ways to provide information without dealing with the encoded metadata directly. Future work in this area will focus on building semantic networks out of single metadata descriptions. Even for the authors of a resource, it is not always easy to provide the adequate information. Establishing a network of resources without being an expert in knowledge building is even harder without appropriate tools that hide the complexity of the underlying models.

Using cryptographic and. watermarking algorithms

Abstract: Because of multimedia's structure and complexity, security mechanisms for multimedia data should be specific for each purpose. We introduce the most important security requirements for all types of multimedia systems. We also survey revocation methods for digital certificates and introduce a media-independent classification scheme.

Reusable multimedia content in Web based learning systems

Abstract: We discuss reusability aspects of interactive multimedia content in Web based learning systems. In contrast to existing approaches, we extend a component based architecture to build interactive multimedia visualizations by using metadata for reusability issues. The experiment we conducted shows how to reuse the same visualization in different learning contexts.

Watermarking with diversity: insights and implications

Abstract: Using communication theory tool sets based on diversity and channel estimation improves the performance of robust digital watermarking algorithms. This article demonstrates that algorithms employing some form of watermark redundancy can be significantly enhanced. It also discusses effective data hiding strategies within the proposed framework and reports on the results of robust reference watermarking.

An online tutoring system for language translation

Abstract: Our interactive intelligent language tutoring system acquires Japanese-English technical translations over the Internet. The system consists of an augmented transition network-based template, a global-matching algorithm embedded in the template structure, a parts-of-speech tagged parser, and a visual interface authoring tool. Acquiring key English patterns greatly simplifies the template structure, which effectively controls an exponential explosion in the number of possible combinations inherent in many natural language applications.

Semantics in Web engineering: applying the Resource Description Framework

Abstract: The authors present an extensible Web modeling framework that applies the Resource Description Framework to Web engineering, providing an interoperable exchange format. The framework uses the same (meta) data model to specify a Web application's structure and content, to make statements about a Web application's elements, and to reason about the data and metadata.

Client and legacy integration in object oriented Web engineering

Abstract: To be successful, e-commerce and Web information systems depend on systematic analysis and design processes. Even more important, our method is based on standard techniques like UML, XML, and Corba. It also allows for the integration of different kinds of clients from Java over HTML to WAP into a distributed environment. Through the smooth integration of highly heterogeneous legacy software and databases, our object oriented Web design provides techniques to achieve this goal.

XML Topic Maps: Finding Aids for the Web

Abstract: opic maps superimpose an external layer that describes the nature of the knowledge represented in the information resources. There are no limitations on the kinds of information that can be characterized by topic maps. The purpose of the Extensible Markup Language topic maps (XTM) initiative is to apply the topic maps paradigm in the context of the World Wide Web. Finding information In a world of infoglut, it's becoming a real challenge to find desired information. Hiding irrelevant information is most effectively and accurately done on the basis of categories, but there's a number of ways to categorize the contents of any corpus, and each system of catego-rization represents only one particular worldview. Information users shouldn't be forced to use a single ontology, taxonomy, glossary, namespace, or other implicit worldview. On the Web, we should federate and exploit different worldviews simultaneously, even if those worldviews are cog-nitively incompatible with each other. Finding information—metadata that helps information seekers to find other information—is often too valuable to limit its exploitability to a single closed or proprietary environment. Finding information should be application-and vendor-neutral, so that users can freely exploit it in many ways and contexts. The topic map paradigm provides a solution for interchanging and federating finding information that diverse sources produce and maintain according to different world-views (see Figure 1). A topic map is a representation of information used to describe and navigate information objects. The topic maps paradigm requires topic map authors to think in terms of topics (subjects, topics of conversation, specific notions, ideas, or concepts), and to associate various kinds of information with specific topics. A topic map is an unobtrusive superimposed layer, external to the information objects it makes findable. The find-ability of a given information object , (that is, the ease with which it can be found) has two aspects: 1. The ease with which a list of information objects that is guaranteed to include the information object can be created by means of some query, and 2. The brevity of that list. The shorter the list, the easier it is for a human being to find the desired information object within the list. A topic map can act as a kind of glue between disparate information objects, allowing all of the objects relevant to a specific concept to be associated with one another. Topic maps are metadata that need not be inside the information they …

Spies, thieves, and lies: the battle for multimedia in the digital era

Abstract: Multimedia security has become an immediate concern for content providers, artists, and the entertainment industry. The apparent panic over the need for an effective mechanism for digital media rights protection echoes in many of today's news stories. The fundamental cause for this frenzy is the leakage problem. The leakage problem involves the illegal duplication, unlawful tampering, and wrongful distribution of media. Because of the popularity of handheld digital cameras, online news magazines, and movies on digital versatile disk (DVD), traditional forms of analog media are being replaced with new digital counterparts. Advances in digital media storage, duplication, editing, and transmission technologies have made this alternative more flexible, scalable, and cost effective for emerging applications. Ironically, however, these same appealing conveniences have facilitated large-scale piracy of and unlawful tampering with digital content. Because of analog media's media, high-quality duplication is expensive and therefore inaccessible to the average consumer. Despite new legislation by governments and the ongoing efforts of the entertainment and high-tech industries, there has been little progress in preventing multimedia theft and tampering.

Guidelines for hypermedia usability inspection

Abstract: Our research addresses evaluating the usability of hypermedia systems oth offline (CD-ROMs) and online (Web) - and tries to capture the features that most characterize the specific nature of these systems. In this article, we describe an inspection technique that lets evaluators concentrate on the usability of specific aspects of hypermedia applications, such as information and navigation structuring, media integration and synchronization, and so on, without neglecting the surface aspects. Our technique uses operational guidelines, called abstract tasks (ATs), which systematically drive the inspection activities, allowing even less experienced evaluators to come up with valuable results. As they currently exist, we see ATs as evaluation patterns, which make it possible to maximize the reuse of an evaluator's expertise. That is, reuse takes advantage of previous work, thus reducing the effort to create a new one. ATs support the reuse of an evaluator's know-how. Their goal is to capture usability inspection expertise and to express it in a precise and understandable form, so that others can easily reproduce, communicate and exploit it. Our current work is devoted to extending the AT library to cover specific usability issues related to e-commerce Web sites.

A unique watermark for every image

Abstract: We address image security issues by proposing a scheme for watermarking images or video at the camera. Each watermark is unique and identifies the owner, camera, and frame number. Application areas include the security industry (for proof of tampering) and commercial photography (for copyright protection).

Multimedia and security

Abstract: he applications accessing multimedia systems and content over the Web have grown immensely in the past five years. Furthermore, many end users can easily use tools to synthesize and edit multimedia information. Thus, security has become one of the most significant problems for distributing new information technology. It is necessary to prevent illegal copying, misappropriation, and misrepresentation of digital audio, images, and video because they can be so easily copied and multiplied without information loss. It’s also important to determine where and how much a multimedia file differs from its original. Thus, a need exists for developing technology that will help protect the integrity of digital content and secure the intellectual-property rights of owners. Watermarking is becoming the key method for protecting digital elements such as image, video, and sound. Digital watermarking embeds a signal into the original element, and the signal uniquely identifies the owner. This requires security solutions for such fields as distributed production processes and e-commerce because the producers seek to provide access control mechanisms to prevent their material’s misuse and theft.