Adam T. Lindsay

Overview of MPEG-7 audio

MPEG-7 is a new ISO standard that facilitates searching for media content much as current text-based search engines ease retrieval of HTML content. This paper gives an overview of the MPEG-7 audio standard, in terms of the applications it might support, its structure, the process by which it was developed, and its specific descriptors and description schemes.

Real-time multimedia tagging and content-based retrieval for CCTV surveillance systems

As the number of installed surveillance cameras increases, and the cost of storing the compressed digital multimedia decreases, the CCTV industry is facing the prospect of large multimedia archives where it may be very difficult to locate specific content. To be able to get the full benefit of this wealth of multimedia data, we need to be able to automatically highlight events of interest to the operator in real-time. We also need to make it possible to quickly identify and retrieve content which meets particular criteria. We show how advances in the Internet and multimedia systems can be used to effectively analyze, tag, store, search and retrieve multimedia content in surveillance systems. IP cameras are utilized for multimedia compression and delivery over the Internet or intranet. The recorded multimedia is analyzed in real-time, and metadata descriptors are automatically generated to describe the multimedia content. The emerging ISO MPEG-7 standard is used to define application-specific multimedia descriptors and description schemes, and to enforce a standard Description Definition Language (DDL) for multimedia management. Finally, a graphical multimedia retrieval application is used to provide content-based searching, browsing, retrieval and playback over the Internet or intranet.

The utility of MPEG-7 systems in audio-visual applications with multiple streams

The MPEG-7 standard presents several interesting challenges with regard to manipulating multimedia content descriptions. We discuss two exemplary applications for MPEG-7: personalized TV services and video surveillance. In doing so, we introduce some capabilities into the standard that test the limits of the current models, namely those of multiple streams and those of carouseling and synch-points. We then introduce proposed extensions that facilitate these additional functionalities, and explore their impact upon the models within the standard.

Tools for Searching, Annotation and Analysis of Speech, Music, Film and Video—A Survey

This article examines the actual and potential use of software tools in research in the arts and humanities focusing on audiovisual (AV) materials such as recorded speech, music, video and film. The quantity of such materials available to researchers is massive and rapidly expanding. Researchers need to locate the material of interest in the vast quantity available, and to organize and process the material once collected. Locating and organizing often depend on metadata and tags to describe the actual content, but standards for metadata for AV materials are not widely adopted. Content-based search is becoming possible for speech, but is still beyond the horizon for music, and even more distant for video. Copyright protection hampers research with AV materials, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems threaten to prevent research altogether. Once material has been located and accessed, much research proceeds by annotation, for which many tools exist. Many researchers make some kind of transcription of materials, and would value tools to automate this process. Such tools exist for speech, though with important limits to their accuracy and applicability. For music and video, researchers can make use of visualizations. A better understanding (in general terms) by researchers of the processes carried out by computer software and of the limitations of its results would lead to more effective use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Improving Wireless Sensor Network Resilience with the INTERSECTION Framework

This paper investigates the INTERSECTION Framework’s ability to build resilience into Wireless Sensor Networks. The framework’s general details are examined along with general approaches to protection against misbehaving WSN nodes. Three different approaches to remediation were implemented and tested on a TinyOS network for their different operating characteristics.

Identifying Legitimate Clients under Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a persistent, current, and very real threat to networks. Expanding upon a flexible distributed framework for network remediation utilising multiple strategies, we examine a novel fusion of methods to maximise throughput from legitimate clients and minimise the impact from attackers. The basic approach is to build up a whitelist of likely legitimate clients by observing outgoing traffic, presenting a challenge though proof-of-work, and providing flow cookies. Traffic that does not match the expected profile is likely attack traffic, and can be heavily filtered during attack conditions. After we incrementally develop this approach, we explore the positive and negative impacts of this approach upon the network and analyse potential countermeasures.

Leveraging community standards for wide compatibility in digital item distribution

The ENTHRONE II project (and its predecessor) heavily use open standards such as MPEG-21, MPEG-7, TV-Anytime, and H.264 as a basis for a full application stack system for Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled delivery for Digital Items. However, in order to reap the gains QoS offers, the project has had to develop a largely closed ecosystem of servers and end-user terminals for monitoring QoS along the delivery path. This brief research note shows that by embracing user-land and non-ISO standards such as RSS, Atom, HTML, and Microformats, many more end-user terminals can be supported in the ENTHRONE ecosystem, albeit in a slightly degraded (no QoS monitoring, somewhat limited content adaptation) mode.