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This paper describes a system for performing alignment of subtitles to audio on multigenre broadcasts using a lightly supervised approach. Accurate alignment of subtitles plays a substantial role in the daily work of media companies and currently still requires large human effort. Here, a comprehensive approach to performing this task in an automated way using lightly supervised alignment is proposed. The paper explores the different alternatives to speech segmentation, lightly supervised speech recognition and alignment of text streams. The proposed system uses lightly supervised decoding to improve the alignment accuracy by performing language model adaptation using the target subtitles. The system thus built achieves the third best reported result in the alignment of broadcast subtitles in the Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB) challenge, with an F1 score of 88.8%. This system is available for research and other non-commercial purposes through webASR, the University of Sheffield’s cloud-based speech technology web service. Taking as inputs an audio file and untimed subtitles, webASR can produce timed subtitles in multiple formats, including TTML, WebVTT and SRT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of online programming, the broadcast TV industry has experienced some negative impacts. The program recommendation has become crucial to boost the industry's construction. While there have been many researches on program recommendation, there are still challenges to overcome such as alleviating the sparsity of user interaction data and improving the dynamics and generalizability of the recommendation model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for TV program recommendation called heterogeneous information-based recommendation with graph enhanced representation (HGER). The HGER model mainly consists of two main modules. One is the program encoder which uses the program's heterogeneous information and attention mechanism to extract personalized content and considers high-order neighbor program representations through a graph structure. The other is the user encoder which utilizes the user's historical viewing behaviors and combines it with the graph structure to represent the high-order neighbor user. Thus, we implement an enhanced representation for both the program and user. Through extensive experiments on a real-world dataset, the results of AUC, NDCG and HR demonstrate that our approach can effectively enhance the dynamics and generalizability of the model for TV program recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle safety communications is an important technology for protecting against automobile accidents. The number of neighbor nodes is important in the automobile industry, which is becoming increasingly more customer-oriented. For this, many protocols that forward a safe message have been studied to protect against chain-reaction collisions when an automobile accident occurs. In this paper, we propose a traffic hazard prediction model based on neighbor nodes for vehicle safety communications on a highway. Highways have high potential of 'chain-reaction collisions' due to the high velocity of vehicles. As a preventive method against chain-reaction collisions, native and intelligent broadcasting sends emergency messages to rear vehicles. However, these methods are ineffective when vehicles are concentrated in one area. This paper offers a broadcasting method considering stopping distance that features an improved back-off algorithm based on the number of neighbor nodes. In comparing the two different methods, our broadcasting method showed a 7 % improvement in frame reception success rate than native and intelligent broadcasting. Finally, this paper suggests empirical applications to verify the adequacy and validity of this system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raptor codes can provide good error correction capability and efficient encoding and decoding rate. Its fountain code property is effective in avoiding packet retransmission for both unicast and multicast service delivery. Hence, there are many mobile, vehicular and broadband applications adopting it such as mobile multimedia broadcasting, multimedia communications for high-speed rails and broadband IPTV systems. In this paper, we present an efficient systematic Raptor codes encoder based on operation lists for known source block lengths. For a Raptor codes application that can frequently use one or several fixed source block lengths (i.e., the number of source symbols in a source block), we could produce the corresponding operation lists in advance and use them to generate the encoding symbols more efficiently. We first introduce the basic architecture of the proposed Raptor encoder, and then describe the details about how to generate operation lists and Raptor intermediate symbols. The simulation results show that our encoder is at least two times faster than the conventional Raptor codes encoder which is adopted by 3GPP and DVB-H. Besides, the reduction on CPU utilization for a real Raptor-based streaming server is described, which is from 11.59 % to 53.41 %, depending on the employed source block length and symbol size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  In this paper, we propose a new real-time content filtering framework for live broadcasts in TV terminals. Content filtering in TV terminals is a necessary provision of personalized broadcasting services in that it enables a TV viewer to obtain desired scenes from multiple channel broadcasts. In this paper, a stable and reliable filtering structure and an algorithm for multiple inputs are proposed. Moreover, real-time filtering requirements such as frame sampling rate per channel, number of input channels, and buffer condition are analyzed to achieve real-time processing in terminals with limited computing power. Based on queueing theory, we model the system and resolve the filtering requirements. To verify the proposed system and analysis, a filtering algorithm for soccer videos is applied which is modified for real-time processing. Through analysis of visual features (e.g., dominant color and edge components) and detection of spatial objects (e.g., a score board), it recognizes a temporal pattern between successive video frames and filters desired scenes. Experiments on soccer videos have been performed and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the 'Multimodal Person Discovery in Broadcast TV' task of MediaEval 2015 benchmarking initiative. Participants were asked to return the names of people who can be both seen as well as heard in every shot of a collection of videos. The list of people was not known a priori and their names had to be discovered in an unsupervised way from media content using text overlay or speech transcripts. The task was evaluated using information retrieval metrics, based on a posteriori collaborative annotation of the test corpus. The first edition of the task gathered 9 teams which submitted 34 runs. This paper provides quantitative and qualitative comparisons of participants submissions. We also investigate why all systems failed for particular shots, paving the way for future promising research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address in this work the topic of broadcasting one's visual reality, captured by the video cameras embedded in mobile and wearable devices, to a remote audience. We discuss several designs of such life broadcasting systems, which we position at the intersection of lifelogging, Alternate Reality, and Cross-Reality technology. To this end, we introduce the "Alternate Reality Broadcast-Time" matrix for the broadcasting and consumption of alternate realities, in which designs of systems that implement sharing and consumption of personal visual realities can be positioned, characterized, and compared. These design options range from simple video streaming over the web using conventional video protocols to mediated and augmented reality, to audio narration and vibrotactile rendering of concepts automatically detected from video captured by wearable cameras. To demonstrate the usefulness of our broadcast-time matrix, we describe three prototypes implementing lifelogging, concept recognition from video, augmented and mediated vision, and vibrotactile feedback. Our contributions open the way toward new applications that blend lifelogging, consumption of multimedia alternate realities, and XR technology to empower users with richer opportunities for self-expression and new means to connect with the followers of events in their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Given the huge amounts of audiovisual materials that are broadcasted every day there is considerable interest in applications that are able to fulfill our need for selecting information. In this paper, we propose a system, VideoZapper, which can personalize and help to select audiovisual content based on its properties (represented as metadata descriptors) and mainly on the past experience of other users with that material. The content is selected based on the user profile and the description of each of the segments to be presented. A second level of selection is based on a virtual edition of the content, taking into account what previous users/viewers did. The paper presents related personalization and metadata approaches, the rational and principles for continuous media personalization, our current architecture and system, and preliminary experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Periodic broadcasting (PB) is a scalable technique for providing video-on-demand services. It significantly reduces server I/O and backbone network bandwidth requirements at the expense of high storage space and high network bandwidth requirements for clients. Traditional protocols assume homogeneous clients with identical resources. Unfortunately, in practice clients have very different bandwidths, and these are usually insufficient to provide video-on-demand (VoD) service from a PB server. Existing work on heterogeneous clients has focused on devising broadcast schedules to cater to low-bandwidth clients, which inevitably requires an extra backbone network bandwidth between the server and the clients. In our previous work, we proposed to use proxies residing at the edge of backbone network to accommodate low bandwidth clients for PB-based VoD services. The server broadcasts a video using a PB protocol while the proxy receives and stores the data in its local buffer and broadcasts the stored data to the clients in its local network. It significantly reduces the waiting time of low-bandwidth clients without requiring any extra backbone bandwidth by using a proxy buffer and channels. However, although lots of PB protocols have been proposed, the scheme can be applied only to some old PB protocols based on a pyramid protocol. In this paper, we propose a proxy-assisted PB system that can be generally applied to almost all the existing PB protocols, by dynamically managing buffer space and channels in proxy servers. Thus, with our proposed system, PB VoD system can be optimized in terms of the resource usages in backbone networks, proxy servers, and clients, by adopting more suitable PB protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The P2P swarm technologies have been shown to be very efficient for medium scale content distribution systems in the last few years, such as the file sharing and video-on-demand (VOD) applications. However it is still an open topic about how to deploy the P2P paradigm for the real time video broadcasting (RTVB) applications. The P2P RTVB application is different from the cache based P2P system because it has more stringent restrictions for startup time and packet loss ratio. In this paper, an adaptive media broadcasting P2P framework named SmartPeerCast which employs the media transrating service to control the quality of service (QoS), is proposed. SmartPeerCast achieves a network awareness, codec awareness, and high performance RTVB service with four key designs: (1) It groups the newly joined peers into different quality clusters by their uploading capability. This clustering mechanism avoids the bandwidth bottleneck between the heterogeneous peers of the overall P2P overlay by only forwarding the same quality stream over the peers in the same cluster. (2) The streaming quality is adjusted adaptively between the sending and the receiving peers by a Smart QoS algorithm to compensate for the network jitters to reduce the receiving peer's playback jitter. (3) The receiving peer monitors the data forwarding QoS of the sending peer to select the best suitable parent node dynamically. The SmartPeerCast uses this Smart QoS framework to implement an incentive mechanism to award the peers with high uploading contributions by migrating them to a higher quality cluster. (4) A transrating engine is used at the leaf nodes of the high quality cluster to forward the stream with suitable bits rate to the nodes of the low quality cluster; this transrating service not only can fully utilize the uploading bandwidth of the peers in the higher quality cluster but also avoids the bandwidth bottleneck of stream forwarding between the heterogeneous peers. Our experiment results and the real deployment show that SmartPeerCast can eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck and content bottleneck between the heterogeneous peers with a smaller startup time and packet loss and it is a high performance and medium scale P2P RTVB framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a probabilistic Bayesian belief network (BBN) method for automatic indexing of excitement clips of sports video sequences. The excitement clips from sports video sequences are extracted using audio features. The excitement clips are comprised of multiple subclips corresponding to the events such as replay, field-view, close-ups of players, close-ups of referees/umpires, spectators, players' gathering. The events are detected and classified using a hierarchical classification scheme. The BBN based on observed events is used to assign semantic concept-labels to the excitement clips, such as goals, saves, and card in soccer video, wicket and hit in cricket video sequences. The BBN based indexing results are compared with our previously proposed event-association based approach and found BBN is better than the event-association based approach. The proposed scheme provides a generalizable method for linking low-level video features with high-level semantic concepts. The generic nature of the proposed approach in the sports domain is validated by demonstrating successful indexing of soccer and cricket video excitement clips. The proposed scheme offers a general approach to the automatic tagging of large scale multimedia content with rich semantics. The collection of labeled excitement clips provide a video summary for highlight browsing, video skimming, indexing and retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Periodic broadcasting (PB) is a scalable technique for providing video-on-demand services. It significantly reduces server input and output (I/O) and backbone network bandwidth requirements, but increases the clients' need for storage space and network bandwidth. Traditional protocols assume homogeneous clients with identical resources. In practice, however, clients have very different bandwidths, which are usually not sufficient for video-on-demand service from a PB server. Existing work on heterogeneous clients has focused on devising broadcast schedules that cater to low-bandwidth clients; these schedules inevitably require additional backbone network bandwidth between the server and the clients. In this paper, we propose a scheme to significantly reduce the waiting time of all heterogeneous clients, without the need for any additional backbone bandwidth. This scheme uses a proxy buffer within video-on-demand systems using PB. In the proposed system, the server broadcasts a video using one of the traditional PB protocols. Simultaneously, the proxy receives the stream from the server and stores it in its local buffer, then broadcasts the stored data to the clients in its local network. Because the proxy provides extra, transparent channels to the server, clients are likely to reduce their reception bandwidth requirements through the use of efficient reception schedules using the extra channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficiency of a video coding process, as well as accuracy of an objective video quality evaluation can be significantly improved by introduction of the human visual system (HVS) characteristics. In this paper we analyze one of these characteristics; namely, visual acuity reduction due to the foveated vision and object movements in a video sequence. We propose a new video quality metric called Foveated Mean Squared Error ( FMSE) that takes into account a variable resolution of the HVS across the visual field. The highest visual acuity is at the point of fixation that falls into fovea, an area at retina with the highest density of photoreceptors. Visual acuity decreases rapidly for image regions which are further with respect to the fixation point. FMSE also utilizes the effect of additional spatial acuity reduction due to motion in a video sequence. The quality measures calculated by FMSE have shown a high correlation with experimental results obtained by subjective video quality assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rapid proliferation of both user-generated and broadcasted content, the interfaces for search and browsing of visual media have become increasingly important. This paper presents a novel intuitive interactive interface for browsing of large-scale image and video collections. It visualises underlying structure of the dataset by the size and spatial relations of displayed images. In order to achieve this, images or video key-frames are initially clustered using an unsupervised graph-based clustering algorithm. By selecting images that are hierarchically laid out on the screen, user can intuitively navigate through the collection or search for specific content. The extensive experimental results based on user evaluation of photo search, browsing and selection as well as interactive video search demonstrate good usability of the presented system and improvement when compared to the standard methods for interaction with large-scale image and video collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Periodic broadcast is a cost-effective solution for large-scale distribution of popular videos. Regardless of the number of video requests, this strategy guarantees a constant worst service latency to all clients, making it possible to serve a large community with a minimal amount of broadcast bandwidth. Although many efficient periodic broadcast techniques have been proposed, most of them impose rigid requirements on client receiving bandwidth. They either demand clients to have the same bandwidth as the video server, or limit them to receive no more than two video streams at any one time. In our previous work, we addressed this problem with a Client-Centric Approach (CCA). This scheme takes into consideration both server broadcast bandwidth and client receiving bandwidth and allows clients to use all their receiving capability for prefetching broadcast data. As a result, given a fixed broadcast bandwidth, a shorter broadcast period can be achieved with an improved client communication capability. In this paper, we present an enhanced version of CCA to further leverage client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast. The new scheme reduces the broadcast latency up to 50% as compared to CCA. We prove the correctness of this new technique and provide an analytical evaluation to show its performance advantage as compared with some existing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  This paper presents a framework that explicitly detects events in broadcasting baseball videos and facilitates the development of many practical applications. Three phases of contributions are included in this work: reliable shot classification, explicit event detection, and elaborate applications. At the shot classification stage, color and geometric information are utilized to classify video shots into several canonical views. To explicitly detect semantic events, rule-based decision and model-based decision methods are developed. We emphasize that this system efficiently and exactly identifies what happened in baseball games rather than roughly finding some interesting parts. On the basis of explicit event detection, many accurate and practical applications such as automatic box score generation and game summarization could be built. The reported results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework and demonstrate some research opportunities about bridging the semantic gap for sports videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Service replication is an effective way to address resource requirements and resource availability problem. Dynamic service selection enables clients to choose a server offering the best performance. Proper server selection is especially important for video streaming over the Internet due to its high bandwidth requirements. However, given the length of a typical video transmission, the server priorly selected may no longer be an optimal one for the duration of the entire transmission. More importantly, a server may fail during the transmission of a video. In this paper we examine the possibility of switching to another server during an on-going transmission for Periodic Broadcast schemes. Due to the timing requirements typical for Periodic Broadcast the server switch may cause playback disruptions. We analyze the magnitude of the problem and propose an easy to implement solution. We define the criteria, additional to the bandwidth availability for example, according to which a new server should be selected. The client is also required to delay its playback by the amount of time bounded by the server transmission offset. In addition, we propose an alternative method to ensure uninterrupted playback that relies on proxy caching. Simulation results show that our approach can significantly reduce the likelihood of playback disruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If anything, our modern life, especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, is characterized by new forms of entertainment. One such entertainment is the radio and TV, which not only provides viewers with the latest news but also entertains them with all kinds of programs and shows. It is not for nothing that broadcasting is considered an essential aspect of any society. On the other hand, the advent of the internet and subsequently social media platforms has caused broadcasters to lose their monopoly and have to jockey for a place in people's leisure time. The situation has been exacerbated by the evolution of broadcasting from relatively simple systems to incredibly complex, interdependent, and policy-heavy structures that must explore and discern the future to remain competitive. Against this backdrop, futures studies which is the scientific, systematic, and formal investigation of likely, desirable, and possible future developments, − can help cushion the blow against stronger competitors. The main tools of futures studies are modeling and simulation. Therefore, this study aims to anticipate the possible alternative scenarios to describe plans for the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) by using system dynamics modeling to identify and develop alternative futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public key broadcast encryption systems, anyone could run the encryption algorithm to broadcast messages by using the public parameters. The unsupervised broadcast strategy allows malicious users (even though someone outside the system with the intentionally divulged public parameters) to distribute junk messages without responsibility. Consequently, content distributor authentication is essential for broadcast encryption systems to forbid spreading of junk information. In this work, we devise a solution for public key broadcast encryption system with adaptive security to resolve the aforementioned vicious broadcaster problem, which is neglected in the previous related works. In our scheme, any user could distribute an encryption of messages with both public parameters and his/her own secret keys, and each message is associated to its broadcaster. The construction is based on the composite order bilinear groups and its adaptive security depends on the hardness of the general subgroup decisional assumptions. Furthermore, this allows our scheme to be flexible in terms on the overhead of ciphertexts, which is constant sized. Compared with previous related broadcast encryption systems constructed in the composite order bilinear groups, our scheme inherits the superiority of adaptive security based non-interactive falsifiable assumption, and simultaneously achieves the optimal ciphertext overhead and the authentication of broadcasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel meta-methodological approach for the user experience and usability methodology procedure evaluation, shown in an example of the user experience and usability study of an interactive HbbTV application. The idea behind this research is not only to evaluate and improve the TV-WEB service but also to gain insights how the participants perceived the whole Ux evaluation procedure itself. The research questions focused mainly on the time complexity (temporal demand) and the frustration level of the TV-WEB evaluation procedure. Additionally the appropriateness of the selected content used, interface and interaction design, and the service impressions and satisfaction/payment related questions was sought. A special questionnaire based on the NASA TLX standard test is presented. The concept has been successfully implemented in several live field trials in three countries (BiH, Serbia and Montenegro). In the user experience and usability study of the service itself more than 150 participants were involved, of those 35 took part in the meta-methodology study. The feedback was quantitatively evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale, with '1' indicating the best positive feedback, '4' neutral/undecided feedback and '7' the most negative feedback. The quantitative average summary results obtained in the three evaluation studies were 1.30 for both the BiH and Serbia test study cases and the score of 1.22 for the test study case in Montenegro. These results show that a great majority of the participants found the whole evaluation procedure time-wise and frustration-wise undemanding, with appropriate content, presentation style and overall attitude towards them. By using this approach it was possible to improve the user experience and usability methodology used, producing more reliable results and providing better user experience in the final version of the product as well as providing a pleasant experience during the testing of the product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several security mechanisms have been investigated and deployed that provide protection for real time platforms. Each security mechanism is contributed to enhance the SCADA system security, but at the same time, the mechanism is limited and depended on the other protocols for the purposes of message security, and its delivery. Few researches are conducted on security for SCADA broadcasting system, but these are limited to end-to-end designs and developments. The security developments for multicasting and broadcasting systems are much complicated, time consumed and/or overloaded with the cryptography mechanisms. After conducting the detail survey, a simulation environment for SCADA water pumping system is designed in-which number of nodes is configured and well known cryptography algorithms are selected, and deployed as an inclusive development for SCADA/DNP3 broadcasting system. The inclusive security development is considered with the best performance, and with predominant weakness in mind, which are present in SCADA/DNP3 broadcasting system. However, overall communication is initiated, monitored and controlled at main controller side with the user defined human machine interface (HMI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Periodic broadcast is a cost-effective solution for large-scale distribution of popular videos. Regardless of the number of video requests, this strategy guarantees constant worst service latency to all clients. An essential periodic broadcast method is the client-centric approach (CCA), which allows clients to use smaller receiving bandwidth to download broadcast data. An enhanced version, namely CCA+, was proposed to yield a shorter waiting time. This work further improves CCA+ by leveraging client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast. The new scheme reduces the broadcast latency by as much as 39 % when compared to CCA+ and 78 % when compared to CCA. We prove the applicability of this new scheme and provide an analytical evaluation to demonstrate the performance advantage, as compared with particular schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents a novel interleaving crescent broadcasting protocol for near video-on-demand service. The interleaving crescent broadcasting protocol is a trade-off among the subscriber’s access latency, maximum buffer requirement, needed subscriber’s bandwidth, and maximum disk I/O transfer rate. A longer subscriber’s access latency may cause a subscriber to leave. A lower maximum buffer requirement, a lower needed subscriber’s bandwidth, and a lower maximum disk I/O transfer rate reduce subscribers’ costs. The interleaving crescent broadcasting protocol not only makes access latency shorter, but also lowers the overall system’s cost. We prove the correctness of the interleaving crescent protocol; provide mathematical analyses to demonstrate its efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]