Rudinei Goularte

Watch-and-comment as a paradigm toward ubiquitous interactive video editing

The literature reports research efforts allowing the editing of interactive TV multimedia documents by end-users. In this article we propose complementary contributions relative to end-user generated interactive video, video tagging, and collaboration. In earlier work we proposed the watch-and-comment (WaC) paradigm as the seamless capture of an individuals comments so that corresponding annotated interactive videos be automatically generated. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype application, the WaCTool, that supports the capture of digital ink and voice comments over individual frames and segments of the video, producing a declarative document that specifies both: different media stream structure and synchronization. In this article, we extend the WaC paradigm in two ways. First, user-video interactions are associated with edit commands and digital ink operations. Second, focusing on collaboration and distribution issues, we employ annotations as simple containers for context information by using them as tags in order to organize, store and distribute information in a P2P-based multimedia capture platform. We highlight the design principles of the watch-and-comment paradigm, and demonstrate related results including the current version of the WaCTool and its architecture. We also illustrate how an interactive video produced by the WaCTool can be rendered in an interactive video environment, the Ginga-NCL player, and include results from a preliminary evaluation.

Techniques for developing more accessible web applications: a survey towards a process classification

The Web has become one of the most important communication media, since it is spread all over the world. In order to enable everyone to access this medium, Web accessibility has become an emerging topic, and many techniques have been evolved to support the development of accessible Web content. This paper presents a survey on techniques for Web accessibility and proposes a classification into the processes of ISO/IEC 12207 standard. The survey was carried out applying systematic review principles during the literature review. The results include analysis obtained from the synthesis of 53 studies, selected from an initial set of 844. Although the survey results indicate a growth in research on techniques for design and evaluation of Web applications, they also indicate that several development activities have been poorly addressed by scientific research efforts.

Interactive multimedia annotations: enriching and extending content

This paper discusses an approach to the problem of annotating multimedia content. Our approach provides annotation as metadata for indexing retrieval and semantic processing as well as content enrichment. We use an underlying model for structured multimedia descriptions and annotations allowing the establishment of spatial temporal and linking relationships. We discuss aspects related with documents and annotations used to guide the design of an application that allows annotations to be made with pen-based interaction with Tablet PCs. As a result a video stream can be annotated during the capture. The annotation can be further edited extended or played back synchronously.

Structuring interactive TV documents

Interactive video technology is meant to support user-interaction with video in scene objects associated with navigation in video segments and access to text-based metadata. Interactive TV is one of the most important applications of this area, which has required the development of standards, techniques and tools, such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, to create, to describe, to deliver and to present interactive content.In this scenario, the structure and organization of documents containing multimedia metadata play an important role. However, the Interactive TV documents structuring and organization has not been properly explored during the development of advanced Interactive TV services.This work presents a model to structure and to organize documents describing Interactive TV programs and its related media objects, as well as the links between them. This model gives support to represent contextual information, and makes possible to use relevant metadata information in order to implement advanced services like object-based searches, in- movie (scenes, frames, in-frame regions) navigation, and personalization. To demonstrate the functionalities of our model, we have developed an application which uses an Interactive TV programs documents descriptions to present information about in-frame video objects.

Context-aware support in structured documents for interactive-TV

Interactive video technology has demanded the development of standards, techniques and tools to create, deliver and present interactive content and associated metadata. The literature reports on models representing interactive-TV (I-TV) programs – one of the main applications of the interactive video technology; the limitation of such models include: strict hierarchical relationships among media objects, low levels of granularity for metadata, programs and media objects descriptions cannot be separated, objects are not described beyond the frame level, lack of integration with context-aware computing. In this paper, we detail features of our MediaObject model for documents describing I-TV programs that aim to minimize those limitations. We discuss the model by means of an application that is part of our I-TV prototype and by an annotation tool that shows that the model can be applied to other domains.

Video steganography for confidential documents: integrity, privacy and version control

The safety of communication in organizations is a very important issue. It is about confidentiality, integrity and authentication during access or editing of confidential internal documents. A non-conventional means to increase security is the use of steganography to hide documents in digital videos, which makes possible to hide higher amounts of information and documents than steganography in images. In this work, we present a steganography technique using MPEG-4 videos aiming to increase documents secrecy. We also propose an architecture for version control of collaborative documents using encryption techniques, together with steganography, providing authentication and electronic documents integrity.

M4Note: a multimodal tool for multimedia annotations

This work discusses an approach to the problem of annotating multimedia content. Our approach provides annotation as metadata for indexing, retrieval and semantic processing as well as content enrichment. We use an underlying model for structured multimedia descriptions and annotations, allowing the establishment of spatial, temporal and linking relationships. We discuss aspects related with documents and annotations used to guide the design of an application that allows annotations to be made with pen-based interaction with tablet PCs. As a result, a video stream can be annotated at the same time that it is captured. Moreover, the annotation can be edited, extended or played back synchronously afterwards.

Ubiquitous Interactive Video Editing Via Multimodal Annotations

Considering that, when users watch a video with someone else, they are used to make comments regarding its contents --- such as a comment with respect to someone appearing in the video --- in previous work we exploited ubiquitous computing concepts to propose the watching-and-commentingauthoring paradigm in which a users comments are automatically captured so as to automatically generate a corresponding annotated interactive video. In this paper we revisit and extend our previous work and detail our prototype that supports the watching-and-editingparadigm, discussing how a ubiquitous computing platform may explore digital ink and associated gestures to support the authoring of multimedia content while enhancing the social aspects of video watching.

Multimedia content personalization based on peer-level annotation

In this paper, we propose an architecture which supports metadata extraction by exploring interaction mechanisms among users and content. The interaction activity addressed in this work is related to peer-level annotation, where any user acts as author, being able to enrich the content by making annotations, using, for instance, pen-based devices. Peer-level annotation makes users comfortable when taking digital notes, as they do in every day life. This is an advantage over hierarchical authoring, which is a time-consuming task usually employed by content providers. The set of metadata extracted by peer-level annotation is used in this paper to generate a users profile, which contains preferences about the content, and may be further explored by personalization services.

Supporting multimedia recommender systems with peer-level annotations

Peer-level annotation stands for the enrichment of content by any user, who acts as author, being able to make annotations, using, for instance, handwriting or speech recognition capabilities. This type of annotation makes users comfortable when taking digital notes, as they do in every day life. This is an advantage over hierarchical authoring, which is a time-consuming task usually employed by content providers. This paper proposes a content-based recommender architecture which explores information that is available at the time users enhance content. This feature enables our architecture to reach a certain level of semantic information from the content and from users preferences, which is essential for recommender systems applications.