Masumi Ishikawa

Onomatopoeia Expressions for Intuitive Understanding of Remote Office Situation

This paper proposes a system for intuitive understanding of remote office situation using onomatopoeia expressions. Onomatopoeia (imitative word) is a word that imitates sound or movement. This system detects office events such as “conversation” or “human movement” from audio and video signals of remote office, and converts them to onomatopoeia texts. Onomatopoeia texts are superimposed on the office image, and sent to the remote office. By using onomatopoeia expressions, the office event such as “conversation” and “human movement” can be compactly expressed as just one word. Thus, people can instantly understand remote office situation without watching the video for a while. Subjective experimental results show that easiness of event understanding is statistically significantly improved by the onomatopoeia expressions compared to the video at 99% confidence level. We have developed a prototype system with two cameras and eight microphones, and then have exhibited it at ultra-realistic communications forum in Japan. In the exhibition, the concept of this system was favorably accepted by visitors.

Music Part Segmentation in Music TV Programs Based on Chroma Vector Analysis

This paper presents a music part detection method incorporating chroma vector analysis for use with music TV programs. Results show that envelopes of chroma components of music signals tend to have horizontal (i.e. temporal) correlation in time-frequency representation because music signals have a periodic chord sequences. Based on this fact, we analyze time series of chroma components and attempt to segment music parts in music TV programs from other parts. Experimental results show an F-measure of 0.78, which is better than that obtained using the previous method.