ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2010: Content Adaptation

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One of the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2010 is about content adaptation, probably one of THE tools providing Universal (Multi-)Media Access (UMA). In particular, it is called "Radvision Challenge 2010: Real-time Data Collaboration Adaptation for Multi-Device Video Conferencing" and details can be found here with the input/output described as follows:

Input for this challenge is a video capture of a free-hand drawing (see example video) in XGA.
Output for this challenge should be a set of “adapted” videos , with the same content in different (smaller) resolutions – for instance, VGA and QVGA. The adapted videos would ideally be regarded by users as perceptually optimal, meaning they hold the same content as the original.

The metrics for evaluation are "defined" as follows:

The following criteria could be used, as well as other evaluation metrics that you may devise:

1. Subjective comparison between the perceptual quality of the original and the “adapted” content.
2. Subjective comparison between the perceptual quality of a scaled-down version of the original (using a 5-tap poly-phase filter) and the “adapted” content.
3. Real-time Performance.

However, there are many possibilities to adapt content and evaluate the result which heavily depends on the user's context. Some people may think that the description of the input/output as well as the evaluation criteria is defined too vague and I tend to agree. Let me explain:

1. The input is given and for the output it is requested to produce "a set of adapted videos" that is "regarded by users as perceptually optimal". However, it's not clear to which context the input shall be adapted. The text says "different (smaller) resolutions" as an example but I can imaging that users will prefer the original video and regard it as perceptually optimal compared to anything else. Thus, in my view it is necessary to specify the context to which the video shall be adapted. The context may include a lot of things such as terminal device, decoding capabilities, network conditions, user location (stationary, mobile), etc., etc.
2. Subjective quality assessment is not an easy task and there are many possibilities and many approaches. Form the description above it is not clear how the subjective quality evaluation will be performed. In particular, I wonder whether "real" subjective tests as suggested by the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) will be adopted (e.g., DSIS - Double Stimulus Impairment Scale or ACR - Absolute Category Scale to just name two). In my view and in order to provide a fair evaluation it is absolutely necessary to define the exact procedure on how the subjective evaluation of the submissions will be performed. One possibility, of course, is the adoption of a standardized approach and probably DSIS is the right candidate.

IEEE ICME 2010 Call for Workshop Papers

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July 19-23, 2010 - Singapore

http://www.icme2010.org/prog_workshops.html

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Sponsored by four IEEE Societies since 2000, the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) has been the flagship multimedia conference and serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems, and applications from both the research and development perspectives of the circuits and systems, communications, computer, and signal processing communities.

This year, the following workshops will be held as an integral part of ICME 2010 on July 23, 2010. Prospective authors are invited to visit the workshop websites for paper submission details.


1. 6th IEEE International Workshop on Networking Issues in Multimedia Entertainment (NIME'10)   (July 23, 2010)
http://www.math.unipd.it/~cpalazzi/NIME10/
Paper Submission Deadline: March 15, 2010
Sponsored by IEEE Communications Society

Workshop Co-Chairs

Marco Roccetti, University of Bologna, Italy
Giovanni Pau, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

2. 2nd International Workshop on IPTV Technologies and
Multidisciplinary Applications (IWITMA 2010)   (July 23, 2010)
http://imde.cio.umh.es/iwitma2010.html
Paper Submission Deadline: March 11, 2010

Workshop Chair

Oscar Martinez-Bonastre, Miguel Hernandez University of Elche, Spain

3. International Workshop on Hot Topics in 3D Multimedia (Hot3D)
(July 23, 2010)
http://www.hot3D.org
Paper Submission Deadline: March 20, 2010 (Regular Paper)/ May 15,
2010 (Position Paper)
Sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society

Workshop Co-Chairs

Dinei Florencio, Microsoft Research, USA
Murat Tekalp, Koc University, Turkey
Anthony Vetro, Mitsubishi, USA
Cha Zhang, Microsoft Research, USA

4. Workshop on Content Protection & Forensics (CPAF 2010)   (July 23, 2010)
http://www.cemnet.ntu.edu.sg/cpaf2010/
Paper Submission Deadline: March 11, 2010

Workshop Co-Chairs

Sabu Emmanuel, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Regunathan Radhakrishnan, Dolby Laboratories Inc., USA
Fulong Ma, Philips Research, China
Li Zhao, Tsinghua University, China

5. International Workshop on Visual Content Identification and Search
(VCIDS 2010)   (July 23, 2010)
http://www.vcids2010.info/
Paper Submission Deadline: March 15, 2010
Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society

Workshop Co-Chairs

Jian Lu, Vobile, Inc., USA
Xian-Sheng Hua, Microsoft Research Asia, China
Dong Xu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

6. Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Installations and Digital Art
(IMIDA 2010)  (July 23, 2010)
http://webia.lip6.fr/~codognet/IMIDA
Paper Submission Deadline: March 11, 2010

Workshop Co-Chairs

Philippe Codognet, CNRS/UPMC/University of Tokyo, Japan
Ryohei Nakatsu, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Naoko Tosa, Kyoto University, Japan

7. 2nd International Workshop on Advances in Music Information
Research (AdMIRe 2010)  (July 23, 2010)
http://www.cp.jku.at/conferences/admire2010/
Paper Submission Deadline: March 14, 2010

Workshop Co-Chairs

Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Oscar Celma, Barcelona Music and Audio Technologies, Spain
Peter Knees, Johannes Kepler University, Austria


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Conference Website: www.icme2010.org
Contact Email: icme2010@gmail.com

(Our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this call for papers.)

ACM Multimedia 2010 - Call for Short Papers, Videos, Cultural Heritage, Open Source Competition, Discussion Rooms, Doctoral Symposium, Technical Demos

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Deadline for submission: May 7th, 2010
http://www.acmmm10.org/
October 25-29th 2010 - Firenze, Italy

The deadline for submissions to ACM Multimedia 2010 Short Papers, Videos, Cultural Heritage, Open Source Competition, Discussion Rooms, Doctoral Symposium and Technical Demos is May 7th, 2010.
Short Papers will be presented as posters in an interactive setting. Short papers should present interesting and exiciting recent results or novel thought-provoking ideas that are not quite ready, and preferrably include a system demonstration.
Videos should present innovative research results, like for example merging augmented reality and real world entities, showing the use of multiple cameras, camera arrays or video-sensor networks or communicate complex ideas through novel means and solutions or showing creative applications or multimedia artistic productions in new contexts.
The Cultural Heritage Track of the Interactive Art Program seeks to connect the cultural heritage and multimedia communities, so to drive innovation in the multimedia field through cultural content and to inject scientific and technological innovations in the cultural heritage area through advanced multimedia techniques.
Open-Source Software Competition is intended to celebrate and encourage the contribution of researchers and software developers to advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, applications, and other multimedia software.
Discussion Rooms are open spaces for debate peer-to-peer basis and will complement Panels (that stimulate experts-to-attendees debates), Tutorials (that provide expert-to-attendees overview or in-depth courses) and Doctoral Symposia (that implement expert-to-PHD moments of scientific suggestion).
Doctoral Symposium provides students involved in the preparation of a PhD in any area of Multimedia with a unique opportunity to have interaction with senior researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research, and meet other doctoral students at the same stage of their dissertation research.
Open-Source Software Competition is intended to celebrate and encourage the contribution of researchers and software developers to advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, applications, and other multimedia software.
Technical demonstrations will provide live evidence of innovative solutions in the field of Multimedia and its applications, showing leading edge research at work. Submissions are particularly encouraged in all innovative areas of Multimedia.
All details for submitting are on the conference web site http://www.acmmm10.org/.
Important dates (check web site for details on each track):

• May 7th, 2010 – Submission deadline
• July 5th, 2010 – Notification of acceptance
• July 26th, 2010 – Camera-ready submission deadline

Special Session: “Advances in Multimedia Delivery” (AMD)

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TEMU 2010 – INT. CONF. ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND MULTIMEDIA
JULY 14-16, 2010, CHANIA, CRETE, GREECE
http://www.temu.gr

Scope

Latest advances in multimedia content encoding and representation, including HDTV, 3DTV, multi-view video and associated added-value interactive services, are offering to the end user a truly rich multimedia experience. On the other hand, the scope of media delivery itself is expanding beyond traditional broadcast TV to active content sharing among all users. It is thus self-evident that the reliable, efficient and timely handling of all these enhanced multimedia services is not only a sine qua non but also a significant challenge for new wired and wireless networking architectures. Future networks, at core and access level, should be able to provide to the end user ubiquitous access (at home, at office and on the move) to both live and on-demand rich media content. Towards this aim, a significant number of research efforts are being carried out throughout the world.

The following research areas fall within the scope of this Special Session:
    * Next-Generation infrastructures for multimedia delivery
    * Satellite and terrestrial multimedia broadcasting systems
    * Mobile TV
    * Interactive broadcasting
    * IP and non-IP transport and session control protocols
    * IPTV platforms and standards
    * Web Radio and WebTV
    * Peer-to-peer streaming architectures
    * Scalable media transmission
    * Error protection and concealment
    * AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) issues
    * Security, encryption and digital rights management for multimedia content
    * Quality of Service and Quality of Experience
    * Market trends and business aspects

We invite original contributions that are not submitted concurrently to another conference. Both PDF and source (Word, LaTEX) versions of the paper, including figures and tables should be submitted electronically to any of the Special Session chairs (see e-mails below). Accepted papers will be formatted according to the TEMU instructions.

Session Co-Chairs

    Dr Georgios Gardikis (gardikis@epp.teicrete.gr), Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
    George Xilouris (xilouris@epp.teicrete.gr), Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
    Dr Harilaos Koumaras (koumaras@iit.demokritos.gr), NCSR “Demokritos”, Greece

Important Dates

    * Full papers submission: April 9, 2010
    * Notification of acceptance: April 23, 2010
    * Camera ready papers: May 8, 2010

WISMA 2010 approaching

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CALL for PAPERS

Workshop on Interoperable Social Multimedia Applications (WISMA 2010)

11th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community

http://dmag.ac.upc.edu/conferences/wisma2010/

Submission due: 14th March 2010 - Workshop dates: 19th-20th May 2010
Workshop venue: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain)

In the Web 2.0, a growing amount of multimedia content is being shared on Social Networks. Due to the dynamic and ubiquitous nature of this content (and associated descriptors), new interesting challenges for  indexing, access, and search and retrieval have arisen. In addition, there is a growing concern on privacy protection, as a lot of personal data is being exchanged. Teenagers (and even younger kids), for example, require special protection applications; while adults are willing to have a higher control over the access to content. Furthermore, the integration of mobile technologies with the Web 2.0 applications is also an interesting area of research that needs to be addressed; not only in terms of content protection, but also considering the implementation of new and enriched context-aware applications. Finally, social multimedia is also expected to improve the performance of traditional multimedia information search and retrieval approaches by contributing to bridge the semantic gap. The integration of these aspects, however, is not trivial and has created a new interdisciplinary area of research.

In any case, there is a common issue that needs to be addressed in all the previously identified social multimedia applications: the interoperability and extensibility of their applications. Thus, the workshop is particularly interested in research contributions based on standards.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Privacy in social networks
• Access control in social networks
• Social media analysis
• Social media retrieval
• Context-awareness in social networks
• Mobile applications scenario
• Social networks ontologies and interoperability
• Security and privacy ontologies
• Content distribution over social networks
• Multimedia ontologies and interoperability
• Multimedia search and retrieval
• Semantic metadata management
• Collaborative tagging
• Interaction between access control and privacy policies
• Social networks and policy languages
• Policy management

Research Papers: Papers should describe original and significant work in
the research practice of related topics.
(i) Long papers: up to 8 pages, will normally be focused on research studies, applications and experiments.
(ii) Short papers: up to 4 pages, will be particularly suitable for reporting work-in-progress, interim results, or as a position paper submission.
Applications and Industrial Presentations: Proposals for presentations of applications or tools, including project reports, industrial practices and models, or tools/systems demonstrations. Abstract: 2 pages.

All submissions and proposals are to be in English and submitted in PDF format at the WISMA paper submission web site (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wisma2010) on or before 14th
March 2010. Papers should be formatted according to LNCS style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0). The workshop proceedings are to be published as a volume at CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org).

General Chair: Jaime Delgado (UPC, Spain).
International Programme Committee:
Anna Carreras (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain),
Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany),
Bill Grosky (University of Michigan, USA),
Chris Poppe (Ghent University - IBBT, Belgium),
Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria),
Dominik Renzel (RWTH Aachen University, Germany),
Frédéric Dufaux (EPFL, Switzerland),
Harald Kosch (University of Passau, Germany),
Herve Bourlard (Idiap, Switzerland),
Jaime Delgado (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain),
Laszlo Böszörmenyi (Klagenfurt University, Austria),
Marc Spaniol (MPI - Saarbrücken, Germany),
Markus Strohmaier (Know Center Graz, Austria),
Mathias Lux (Klagenfurt University, Austria),
Michael Granitzer (Know Center Graz, Austria),
Oge Marques (Florida Atlantic University, USA),
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Germany),
Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France),
Romulus Grigoras (ENSEEIHT, France),
Ruben Tous (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain),
Savvas Chatzichristofis (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece),
Vincent Charvillat (ENSEEIHT, France),
Vincent Oria (NJIT, USA),
Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research Graz, Austria),
Yu Cao (California State University, Fresno, USA).

Supported by:
Multimedia Metadata Community
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BARCELONATECH
segur@, a project co-funded by the CDTI (Government of Spain)
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Peer-to-Peer Computing 2010

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August 25-27, 2010, Delft, Netherlands: http://p2p10.org/

Scope and Topics
The P2P'10 conference solicits papers on all aspects of peer-to-peer computing. Of particular interest is research that furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of peer-to-peer applications and systems, or that investigates real, deployed, large-scale peer-to-peer applications or systems. The applications can range from the traditional peer-to-peer application of file sharing to more novel applications such as media streaming and intelligence sharing. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following aspects of P2P computing:

• Information retrieval and query support
• Semantic overlay networks and semantic query routing
• P2P for grids, clouds, and datacenters
• Deployed (commercial) applications and systems
• Security, trust, and reputation
• Cooperation, incentives, and fairness
• P2P economics
• Social networks
• Overlay architectures and topologies
• Overlay interaction with underlying infrastructure
• Overlay monitoring and management
• Self-organization
• P2P applications and systems over mobile networks
• Performance, robustness, and scalability 

Paper submission guidelines
Papers can be submitted either as full papers or as short papers in the IEEE single-spaced two-column format using at least 10 point font size. Full papers should not exceed 10 pages and short papers should not exceed 4 pages. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format through the paper-submission website linked from the conference website. IEEE templates for LaTeX and Microsoft Word, as well as related information, can be found at the IEEE Digital Toolbox webpage. The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Communications Society.

All submissions will be evaluated using a double-blind review process. To ensure blind reviewing, papers should be anonymized by removing author names and affiliations, as well as by masking any information about projects and bibliographic references, etc. that might reveal the authors' identities. Papers that are not properly anonymized will be returned without review. Submitted papers should describe original and previously unpublished research and are not allowed to be simultaneously submitted or under review elsewhere.

All papers must be registered with the submission system by the abstract submission deadline. At least one author of every accepted paper must register to the conference not later than June 10, 2010, 12 PM (EST) and present the paper.

Important Dates

• Abstracts Due March 29, 2010
• Full Papers Due April 5, 2010
• Conference: August 25, 2010

O Universal Multimedia Access, Where Art Thou? (Part III)

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-by Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University, Austria

Preface: First I thought about writing this article for a journal or something equivalent but then I concluded to make this article available through my blog. The aim is to perform an experiment in order to determine whether it is possible (a) to get direct feedback through comments and (b) to be referenced from elsewhere. As it is a quite comprehensive article, it’s split up in separate parts. If someone (i.e., a journal editor) is interested in publishing this article, yes, I can still do that! :-)

Part I was about giving an introduction to the topic and an overview on multimedia content adaptation techniques. Part II was about the adaptation by transformation approach that utilizes scalable coding formats such as JPEG2000, MPEG-4 BSAC, and MPEG-4 SVC. This part comprises adaptation decision-taking also known as the brain of multimedia content adaptation.

Part III – Adaptation Decision-Taking

Definition: (Multimedia) adaptation decision-taking is referred to as the process of finding the optimal parameter settings for (multiple, possibly in series connected) multimedia content adaptation engines given the properties, characteristics, and capabilities of the content and the context in which it will be processed.

Problem Description

The information revolution of the last decade has resulted in a phenomenal increase in the quantity of multimedia content available to an increasing number of different users with different preferences who access it through a plethora of devices and over heterogeneous networks. End devices range from mobile phones to high definition TVs, access networks can be as diverse as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and broadband networks, and the various backbone networks are different in bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) support. Additionally, users have different content/presentation preferences and intend to consume the content at different locations, times, and under altering circumstances, i.e., within a variety of different contexts.

In order to cope with situations indicated above, multimedia content adaptation has become a key issue which results in a lot of research and standardization efforts collectively referred to as Universal Multimedia Access (UMA). An important aspect of UMA is adaptation decision-taking (ADT) which aims at finding the optimal parameter settings for the actual multimedia content adaptation engines based on the properties, characteristics, and capabilities of the content and the context in which it will be processed. This article provides an overview of the different metadata required for adaptation decision-taking and points out technical solution approaches for the actual decision-taking.

High-level Architecture and Metadata Assets

Figure 1 depicts a high-level architecture for adaptation decision-taking including the actual content adaptation. The input of the adaptation decision-taking engine (ADTE) can be divided into content- and context-related metadata. The former provides information about the syntactic and semantic aspects (e.g., bitrate, scene description) of the multimedia content that support the decision-taking process. The latter describes the usage environment (e.g., terminal capabilities) in which the multimedia content is consumed or processed. The result of the ADTE is an adaptation decision which steers the multimedia content adaptation engine(s) to produce the adapted multimedia content fulfilling the constraints imposed by the context-related metadata. The input to the actual adaptation engine is the given multimedia content possibly accompanied with additional content-related metadata required for the adaptation itself (e.g., syntax descriptions).

 

Figure 1. High-level Architecture of Adaptation Decision-Taking and Multimedia Content Adaptation.

The focus of this article is on the ADTE. In the following sections the two types of metadata assets required for adaptation decision-taking are reviewed and, finally, technical solution approaches are highlighted.

Content-related Metadata

This type of metadata comprises descriptive information about the characteristics of the content which can be divided into four categories:

• Semantic metadata provides means for annotating multimedia content with textual information enabling various applications such as search and retrieval. This kind of metadata covers a broad range of annotation possibilities, among them are the name of the content, authors, actors, scene descriptions, etc.
• Media characteristics describe the syntactical information pertaining to multimedia bitstreams in terms of the physical format and its characteristics. This may include the storage and coding format as well as bit-rate, frame-rate, width, height, and other related parameters.
• The Digital Rights Management (DRM) information for adaptation decision-taking specify which kind of adaptation operations (e.g., scaling, format conversion, etc.) are allowed and under which constraints (e.g., bit-rate shall be greater than 512kbps).
• Finally, Adaptation Quality of Service (QoS) describes the relationship between usage environment constraints, feasible adaptation operations satisfying these constraints, and associated utilities (i.e., qualities).

Context-related Metadata

Similar to the content-related metadata, the context-related metadata can be also divided into four categories:

• End user-related metadata: The first category of metadata is pertained to metadata describing the characteristics of end users in terms of preferences, disabilities, and location-based information.
• Terminal-related metadata: The second category provides context information regarding the capabilities of the terminal which are used by the end users for consuming multimedia content. This information includes – among others – information about the codecs installed, display properties, and audio capabilities.
• Network-related metadata: The third category of metadata comprises the information concerning the access and core networks in terms of its characteristics and conditions. Such information may include bandwidth, delay, and jitter.
• Adaptation-related metadata: Finally, the fourth category of metadata describes the actual adaptation engines in terms of adaptation operations they are capable to perform. For example, an adaptation engine may be able to perform temporal scaling whereas another one provides means for spatial scaling or even complex transcoding operations between different coding formats.

Solution Approaches for Adaptation Decision-Taking

In the literature the following approaches towards adaptation decision-taking are known:

• Knowledge-based ADT [1]: adopts an Artificial Intelligence-based planning approach to find an appropriate sequence of adaptation steps from an initial state (i.e., described by content-related metadata) towards a goal state (i.e., described by context-related metadata).
• Optimization-based ADT [2]: models the problem of finding adaptation decisions as a mathematical optimization problem by describing functional dependencies between content- and context-related metadata. Furthermore, limitation constraints as well as an objective function is specified.
• Utility-based ADT [3]: can be seen as an extension of the previous two approaches which explicitly takes the users’ specific utility aspects into account.

This is the end of Part III and I will continue in Part IV with interoperability issues, i.e., standards supporting UMA. Thus, stay tuned!
 

References

[1]    D. Jannach, K. Leopold, C. Timmerer, and H. Hellwagner, "A Knowledge-based Framework for Multimedia Adaptation", Applied Intelligence, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 109-125, April 2006.
[2]    I. Kofler, C. Timmerer, H. Hellwagner, A. Hutter, and F. Sanahuja, "Efficient MPEG-21-based Adaptation Decision-Taking for Scalable Multimedia Content", Proceedings of the 14th SPIE Annual Electronic Imaging Conference – Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN 2007), San Jose, CA, USA, January/February 2007.
[3]    M. Prangl, T. Szkaliczki, and H. Hellwagner, "A Framework for Utility-based Multimedia Adaptation", IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 719-728, June 2007.