Sari Järvinen

Personal video retrieval and browsing for mobile users

The latest camera-equipped mobile phones and faster cellular networks have increased the interest in mobile multimedia services. But for content consumption, delivery and creation, the limited capabilities of mobile terminals require special attention. This paper introduces the Candela platform, an infrastructure that allows the creation, storage and retrieval of home videos with special consideration of mobile terminals. Candela features a J2ME-based video recording and annotation tool which permits the creation and annotation of home videos on mobile phones. It offers an MPEG-7-based home video database which can be queried in an intelligent and user-oriented manner exploiting users’ personal domain ontologies. The platform employs terminal profiling techniques to deliver video retrieval user interfaces that personalize the search results according to the users preferences and terminal capabilities, facilitating effective retrieval of home videos via various both mobile and fixed terminals. For video playout, Candela features a meta player, a video player augmented by an interactive metadata display which can be used for fast content-based in-video browsing, helping to avoid the consumption and streaming of uninteresting video parts, thus reducing network load. Thereby, Candela forms a comprehensive video management platform for mobile phones fully covering mobile home video management from acquisition to delivery.

User Experience in Added Value Location-Based Mobile Music Service

In this paper, the user experience in added value location-based mobile music service called the City Night Life (CNL) is evaluated and analyzed. The CNL service provides recommendations about entertainment premises in the proximity by matching their music styles with the user’s personal music preferences. Entertainment premises are shown on a map interface and are marked with colors according to their match. The paper presents the components of the CNL service, the music profile, matching algorithm and the map-based user interface in a web browser. The user evaluation with 53 test users assessed the feasibility and business potential of the CNL service. Data was collected with both quantitative questionnaires and short interviews. The results indicate that the CNL service will be most useful in relatively large, unfamiliar cities. Furthermore, the matching algorithm was perceived to perform quite well.

Deploying mobile multimedia services for everyday experience sharing

This paper presents a solution for creating light-weighted content and context-aware mobile multimedia services. The main application domain is in user created multimedia content and experience sharing. Our approach is to have a platform supporting state-of-the art content management functionalities in order to enable easy creation of specialized multimedia services for various target groups and purposes. We have developed a mobile multimedia content creation platform with integrated context metadata support. To verify the overall functionality of our platform we have defined a multimedia content service template and created a set of exemplary services using web-based technologies such as JavaScript, Media RSS feed and Java.

Multimedia service creation platform for mobile experience sharing

The multimedia content created by users with their mobile phones is often shared with family and friends to recreate personal experiences. It is difficult for a single media sharing service to cover all variations on how people would like to present their experiences of different events; thus it is important to be able to easily create versions of these services. This paper presents in detail our platform implementation for enabling the creation of lightweight content- and context-aware mobile multimedia services. The platform supports state-of-the-art content management functionalities in order to enable easy creation of specialized multimedia services for various target groups and purposes. Our solution includes context metadata support for mobile multimedia content and creation of location-aware multimedia services. We have built example services on top of the platform using web-based technologies such as JavaScript, Media RSS feed and Java. The functionality of the platform has been tested in user evaluations with promising results.

Candela-Storage, Analysis, and Retrieval of Video Content in Distributed Systems: Personal Mobile Multimedia Management

Video management research has largely been ignoring the increased attractiveness of using camera-equipped mobile phones for the production of short home video clips, mostly considering them as additional channels for video consumption. The CANDELA project, which is part of the European ITEA program, focuses on the integration of video content analysis with advanced retrieval, mobile, networked delivery, and distributed storage technologies. In this paper, we present the CANDELA personal mobile multimedia management platform, which implements an end-to-end system for personal video production, retrieval, and consumption utilizing mobile devices and distributed databases

Web-based Augmented Reality Video Streaming for Marketing

This paper presents an Adobe Flash-based augmented reality video streaming application and its practical use in web marketing. The application enables augmenting the content of a web cam view by adding video content to it. Aller Media, a Nordic media company, used the application for advertising two Finnish movies with promotional video content. We have examined combining of conventional print media and digital media and the suitability of the augmented reality video streaming application for the web environment and marketing purposes. Additionally, we measured the technical performance of the application. The feedback from Aller Media and the end-users indicates that the application is useful for marketing purposes. In addition, the results show that the application is well suited for web environment as its performance is sufficient and as the distribution is more efficient compared to desktop or mobile applications.

Treasure Hunt with Intelligent Luminaires

The unobtrusive methods to monitor and track people behaviour are getting more common. At the same time novel lighting control and the LED technologies allow dynamic real-time controlling of the illumination systems. This progress will support the development of implicit interaction between humans and lighting systems. In this paper, we describe the results of our study on how to create a situation-aware real-time light control system that adapts automatically to person behaviour in ambient space. In future this approach could be used e.g. for guiding visitors in public places or promoting new products. We have implemented a proof-of-concept application -- a Treasure Hunt game - by using a depth sensor based people tracking service, wirelessly controlled RGB LEDs and a light controlling unit where the LED bulbs change their colour according to person position and movement in a room.

Shopper Behaviour Analysis Based on 3D Situation Awareness Information

The customer behaviour understanding is of major importance to brick and mortar retail struggling to keep their market share and competing with online retail. In this paper, we propose a customer behaviour tracking solution based on 3D data. We can cover large areas using numerous inexpensive networked 3D sensors for monitoring and tracking people and we have adopted an adaptive background model in order to be able to react to changes in the store environment. Experiments with people tracking and analysis of the trajectories in a department store show that use of inexpensive 3D sensors and lightweight computation allows classifying shopping behaviour into three classes (passers-by, decisive customers, exploratory customers) with 80 % accuracy.

Location Based Abstraction of User Generated Mobile Videos

Demand for efficient ways to represent vast amount of video data has grown rapidly in recent years. The advances in positioning services have led to new possibilities of combining location information to video content. In this paper we present an automatic video editing system for geotagged mobile videos. In our solution the system creates automatically a video summary from a set of unedited video clips. Geotags are used to group video clips with the same context properties. The groups are used to create a video summary where the videos from the same group are represented as scenes. The novelty in our solution lies in the combining of geotags with low level content analysis tools in video abstraction. Evaluations of the system prove the concept useful as it improves coherence and enjoyability of the automatic video summaries.

Feasibility evaluation of context distribution in mobile environment

Although mobile devices are rich sources of context information, the distribution of context in mobile environments is often hindered by the limited battery life, and wireless connections with low bandwidth. In this paper, we present two different implementations that enable context distribution in mobile environments. The first solution relies on a presence service architecture and publish-subscribe messaging, whereas the second solution is based on a mobile web server architecture where the context information is fetched from the mobile device when needed. This paper evaluates the feasibility of the two implementations in mobile context distribution. The testing results show that the mobile server-based solution sets higher demands for the mobile device capabilities, but is able to provide more up-todate context information. However, the solution based on the centralized context service provides higher interoperability as it utilizes the existing IETF standards.