Seán Marlow

Rhythm detection for speech-music discrimination in MPEG compressed domain

A novel approach to speech-music discrimination based on rhythm (or beat) detection is introduced. Rhythmic pulses are detected by applying a long-term autocorrelation method on band-passed signals. This approach is combined with another, in which the features describe the energy peaks of the signal. The discriminator uses just three features that are computed from data directly taken from an MPEG-1 bitstream. The discriminator was tested on more than 3 hours of audio data. Average recognition rate is 97.7%.

Automatic TV advertisement detection from MPEG bitstream

Abstract The Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University conducts concentrated research and development in the area of digital video management. The current stage of development is demonstrated on our Web-based digital video system called Fischlar (Proceedings of the Content based Multimedia Information Access, RIAO 2000, Vol. 2, Paris, France, 12–14 April 2000, p. 1390), which provides for efficient recording, analysing, browsing and viewing of digitally captured television programmes. Advertisement breaks during or between television programmes are typically recognised by a series of ‘black’ video frames simultaneously accompanying a depression in audio volume which separate each advertisement from one another by recurrently occurring before and after each individual advertisement. It is the regular prevalence of these flags that enables automatic differentiation between what is programme and what is a commercial break. This paper reports on the progress made in the development of this idea into an advertisement detector system that automatically detects the commercial breaks from the bitstream of digitally captured television broadcasts.

The físchlár digital video system: a digital library of broadcast TV programmes

Físchl& acute;r is a system for recording, indexing, browsing and playback of broadcast TV programmes which has been operational on our University campus for almost 18 months. In this paper we give a brief overview of how the system operates, how TV programmes are organised for browse/playback and a short report on the system usage by over 900 users in our University.

Fischlar: an on-line system for indexing and browsing broadcast television content

This paper describes a demonstration system which automatically indexes broadcast television content for subsequent non-linear browsing. User-specified television programmes are captured in MPEG-1 format and analysed using a number of video indexing tools such as shot boundary detection, keyframe extraction, shot clustering and news story segmentation. A number of different interfaces have been developed which allow a user to browse the visual index created by these analysis tools. These interfaces are designed to facilitate users locating video content of particular interest. Once such content is located, the MPEG-1 bitstream can be streamed to the user in real-time. This paper describes both the high-level functionality of the system and the low-level indexing tools employed, as well as giving an overview of the different browsing mechanisms employed.

QIMERA: A SOFTWARE PLATFORM FOR VIDEO OBJECT SEGMENTATION AND TRACKING

In this paper we present an overview of an ongoing collaborative project in the field of video object segmentation and tracking. The objective of the project is to develop a flexible modular software architecture that can be used as test-bed for segmentation algorithms. The background to the project is described, as is the first version of the software system itself. Some sample results for the first segmentation algorithm developed using the system are presented and directions for future work are discussed.

MPEG audio bitstream processing towards the automatic generation of sports programme summaries

The frequency subband scale-factors are fundamental components of MPEG-1 audio encoded bitstreams. Examination of scale-factor weights is sufficient for the establishment of an audio amplitude profile of an audio track. If, for sports programme TV broadcasts, the audio amplitude is assumed to primarily reflect the noise level exhibited by the commentator (and/or attending spectators), then, this vocal reaction to the significance of unfolding events may be used as a basis for summarisation. i.e. by relying on the exhilaration, or otherwise, expressed by the commentator/spectators, individual clips of the programme (e.g. camera shots), may be ranked according to their relative significance. A summary may then be produced by amalgamating (chronologically) any number of these clips corresponding to selected audio peaks.

Temporal video segmentation for real-time key frame extraction

The extensive amount of media coverage today, generates difficulties in identifying and selecting desired information. Browsing and retrieval systems become more and more necessary in order to support users with powerful and easy-to-use tools for searching, browsing and summarization of information content. The starting point for these tasks in video browsing and retrieval systems is the low level analysis of video content, especially the segmentation of video content into shots. This paper presents a fast and efficient way to detect shot changes using only the temporal distribution of macroblock types in MPEG compressed video. The notion of a dominant reference frame is introduced here. A dominant frame denotes the reference frame (I or P) used as prediction reference for most of the macroblocks from a subsequent B frame.

Energy-Efficient Hardware Architecture for Variable N-point 1D DCT

This paper proposes an energy-efficient hardware acceleration architecture for the variable N-point 1D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) that can be leveraged if implementing MPEG-4’s Shape Adaptive DCT (SA-DCT) tool. The SA-DCT algorithm was originally formulated in response to the MPEG-4 requirement for object based texture coding, and is one of the most computationally demanding blocks in an MPEG-4 video codec. Therefore energy-efficient implementations are important – especially on battery powered wireless platforms. This N-point 1D DCT architecture employs a re-configurable distributed arithmetic data path and clock gating to reduce power consumption.

Mobile access to the Físchlár-News archive

In this paper, we describe how we support mobile access to Fischlar-News, a large-scale library of digitised news content, which supports browsing and content-based retrieval of news stories. We discuss both the desktop and mobile interfaces to Fischlar-News and contrast how the mobile interface implements a different interaction paradigm from the desktop interface, which is based on constraints of designing systems for mobile interfaces. Finally we describe the technique for automatic news story segmentation developed for Fischlar-News and we chart our progress to date in developing the system.

Online television library: organization and content browsing for general users

This paper describes the organizational and playback features of Fischlar, a digital video library that allows users o record, browse and watch television programs on- line. Programs that can be watched and recorded are organized by personal recommendations, genre classifications, name and other attributes for access by general television users. Motivations and interactions of users with on-line television libraries are outlined and they are also supported by personalized library access, categorized programs, a combined player browse with content viewing history and content marks. The combined player browser supports a user who watches a program on different occasions in a non-sequential order.