DOTS (Dynamic Object Tracking System) is an indoor, real-time, multi-camera surveillance system, deployed in a real office setting. DOTS combines video analysis and user interface components to enable security personnel to effectively monitor views of interest and to perform tasks such as tracking a person. The video analysis component performs feature-level foreground segmentation with reliable results even under complex conditions. It incorporates an efficient greedy-search approach for tracking multiple people through occlusion and combines results from individual cameras into multi-camera trajectories. The user interface draws the users' attention to important events that are indexed for easy reference. Different views within the user interface provide spatial information for easier navigation. DOTS, with over twenty video cameras installed in hallways and other public spaces in our office building, has been in constant use for a year. Our experiences led to many changes that improved performance in all system components.

We present methods for semantic annotation of multimedia data. The goal is to detect semantic attributes (also referred to as concepts) in clips of video via analysis of a single keyframe or set of frames. The proposed methods integrate high performance discriminative single concept detectors in a random field model for collective multiple concept detection. Furthermore, we describe a generic framework for semantic media classification capable of capturing arbitrary complex dependencies between the semantic concepts. Finally, we present initial experimental results comparing the proposed approach to existing methods.

The past two years at UbiComp, our workshops on design and usability in next generation conference rooms engendered lively conversations in the community of people working in smart environments. The community is clearly vital and growing. This year we would like to build on the energy from previous workshops while taking on a more interactive and exploratory format. The theme for this workshop is "embodied meeting support" and includes three tracks: mobile interaction, tangible interaction, and sensing in smart environments. We encourage participants to present work that focuses on one track or that attempts to bridge multiple tracks.

This paper describes FXPAL's interactive video search application, "MediaMagic". FXPAL has participated in the TRECVID interactive search task since 2004. In our search application we employ a rich set of redundant visual cues to help the searcher quickly sift through the video collection. A central element of the interface and underlying search engine is a segmentation of the video into stories, which allows the user to quickly navigate and evaluate the relevance of moderately-sized, semantically-related chunks.

The recent emergence of multi-core processors enables a new trend in the usage of computers. Computer vision applications, which require heavy computation and lots of bandwidth, usually cannot run in real-time. Recent multi-core processors can potentially serve the needs of such workloads. In addition, more advanced algorithms can be developed utilizing the new computation paradigm. In this paper, we study the performance of an articulated body tracker on multi-core processors. The articulated body tracking workload encapsulates most of the important aspects of a computer vision workload. It takes multiple camera inputs of a scene with a single human object, extracts useful features, and performs statistical inference to find the body pose. We show the importance of properly parallelizing the workload in order to achieve great performance: speedups of 26 on 32 cores. We conclude that: (1) data-domain parallelization is better than function-domain parallelization for computer vision applications; (2) data-domain parallelism by image regions and particles is very effective; (3) reducing serial code in edge detection brings significant performance improvements; (4) domain knowledge about low/mid/high level of vision computation is helpful in parallelizing the workload.

Our featured wand, automatically tracked by video cameras, provides an inexpensive and natural way for users to interact with devices such as large displays. The wand supports six degrees of freedom for manipulation of 3D applications like Google Earth. Our system uses a 'line scan' to estimate the wand pose tracking which simplifies processing. Several applications are demonstrated.

We describe a new interaction technique that allows users to control nonlinear video playback by directly manipulating objects seen in the video. This interaction technique is simi-lar to video "scrubbing" where the user adjusts the playback time by moving the mouse along a slider. Our approach is superior to variable-scale scrubbing in that the user can con-centrate on interesting objects and does not have to guess how long the objects will stay in view. Our method relies on a video tracking system that tracks objects in fixed cameras, maps them into 3D space, and handles hand-offs between cameras. In addition to dragging objects visible in video windows, users may also drag iconic object representations on a floor plan. In that case, the best video views are se-lected for the dragged objects.

In this paper we describe the analysis component of an indoor, real-time, multi-camera surveillance system. The analysis includes: (1) a novel feature-level foreground segmentation method which achieves efficient and reliable segmentation results even under complex conditions, (2) an efficient greedy search based approach for tracking multiple people through occlusion, and (3) a method for multi-camera handoff that associates individual trajectories in adjacent cameras. The analysis is used for an 18 camera surveillance system that has been running continuously in an indoor business over the past several months. Our experiments demonstrate that the processing method for people detection and tracking across multiple cameras is fast and robust.

As more and more tools are developed for meeting support tasks, properly using these tools to get expected results becomes too complicated for many meeting participants. To address this problem, we propose POEMS (Paper Offered Environment Management Service) that allows meeting participants to control services in a meeting environment through a digital pen and an environment photo on digital paper. Unlike state-of-the-art device control interfaces that require interaction with text commands, buttons, or other artificial symbols, our photo enabled service access is more intuitive. Compared with PC and PDA supported control, this new approach is more flexible and cheap. With this system, a meeting participant can initiate a whiteboard on a selected public display by tapping the display image in the photo, or print out a display by drawing a line from the display image to a printer image in the photo. The user can also control video or other active applications on a display by drawing a link between a printed controller and the image of the display. This paper presents the system architecture, implementation tradeoffs, and various meeting control scenarios.

As more and more tools are developed for meeting support tasks, properly using these tools to get expected results becomes very complicated for many meeting participants. To address this problem, we propose POEMS (Paper Offered Environment Management Service) that can facilitate the activation of various services with a pen and paper based interface. With this tool, meeting participants can control meeting support devices on the same paper that they take notes. Additionally, a meeting participant can also share his/her paper drawings on a selected public display or initiate a collaborative discussion on a selected public display with a page of paper. Compared with traditional interfaces, such as tablet PC or PDA based interfaces, the interface of this tool has much higher resolution and is much cheaper and easier to deploy. The paper interface is also natural to use for ordinary people.

AnySpot is a web service-based platform for seamlessly connecting people to their personal and shared documents wherever they go. We describe the principles behind AnySpot's design and report our experience deploying it in a large, multi-national organization.

We present an investigation of interaction models for slideshow applications in a multi-display environment. Three models are examined: Direct Manipulation, Billiard Ball, and Flow. These concepts can be demonstrated by the ModSlideShow prototype, which is designed as a configurable modular display system where each display unit communicates with its neighbors and fundamental operations that act locally can be composed to support the higher level interaction models. We also describe the gesture input scheme, animation feedback, and other enhancements.

A common video surveillance task is to keep track of people moving around the space being monitored. It is often difficult to track activity between cameras because locations such as hallways in office buildings can look quite similar and do not indicate the spatial proximity of the cameras. We describe a spatial video player that orients nearby video feeds with the field of view of the main playing video to aid in tracking between cameras. This is compared with the traditional bank of cameras with and without interactive maps for identifying and selecting cameras. We additionally explore the value of static and rotating maps for tracking activity between cameras. The study results show that both the spatial video player and the map improve user performance when compared to the camera-bank interface. Also, subjects change cameras more often with the spatial player than either the camera bank or the map, when available.

We present the iterative design of Momento, a tool that provides integrated support for situated evaluation of ubiquitous computing applications. We derived requirements for Momento from a user-centered design process that included interviews, observations and field studies of early versions of the tool. Motivated by our findings, Momento supports remote testing of ubicomp applications, helps with participant adoption and retention by minimizing the need for new hardware, and supports mid-to-long term studies to address infrequently occurring data. Also, Momento can gather log data, experience sampling, diary, and other qualitative data.

We present a general approach to temporal media segmentation using supervised classification. Given standard low-level features representing each time sample, we build intermediate features via pairwise similarity. The intermediate features comprehensively characterize local temporal structure, and are input to an efficient supervised classifier to identify shot boundaries. We integrate discriminative feature selection based on mutual information to enhance performance and reduce processing requirements. Experimental results using large-scale test sets provided by the TRECVID evaluations for abrupt and gradual shot boundary detection are presented, demonstrating excellent performance.

3D renderings can often look cold and impersonal or even cartoonish. They can also appear too crisply detailed . This can cause viewers to concentrate on specific details when they should be focusing on a more general idea or concept. With the techniques covered in this tutorial you will be able to turn your 3D renderings into "hand drawn" looking illustrations.

This chapter describes how the changing information about an individual's location, environment, and social situation can be used to initiate and facilitate people's interactions with one another, individually and in groups. Context-aware communication is contrasted with other forms of context-aware computing and we characterize applications in terms of design decisions along two dimensions: the extent of autonomy in context sensing and the extent of autonomy in communication action. A number of context-aware communication applications from the research literature are presented in five application categories. Finally, a number of issues related to the design of context-aware communication applications are presented.

This survey, aimed at information processing researchers, highlights intriguing but lesser known results, corrects misconceptions, and suggests research areas. Themes include: certainty in quantum algorithms; the "fewer worlds" theory of quantum mechanics; quantum learning; probability theory versus quantum mechanics.

In 2006 FXPAL submitted results for shot boundary detection, high-level feature extraction, and interactive search.

When people are checking in to flights, making reports to their company manager, composing music, delivering papers for exams in schools, or examining patients in hospitals, they all deal with documents and processes of documentation. In earlier times, documentation took place primarily in libraries and archives. While the latter are still important document institutions, documents today play a far more essential role in social life in many different domains and cultures. In this book, which celebrates the ten year anniversary of documentation studies in Tromsø, experts from many different disciplines, professional domains as well as cultures around the world present their way of dealing with documents, demonstrating many potential directions for the emerging broad field of documentation studies.

This chapter describes how the adaptive web technologies discussed in this book have been applied to news access. First, we provide an overview of different types of adaptivity in the context of news access and identify corre-sponding algorithms. For each adaptivity type, we briefly discuss representative systems that use the described techniques. Next, we discuss an in-depth case study of a personalized news system. As part of this study, we outline a user modeling approach specifically designed for news personalization, and present results from an evaluation that attempts to quantify the effect of adaptive news access from a user perspective. We conclude by discussing recent trends and novel systems in the adaptive news space.

This chapter discusses content-based recommendation systems, i.e., systems that recommend an item to a user based upon a description of the item and a profile of the user's interests. Content-based recommendation systems may be used in a variety of domains ranging from recommending web pages, news articles, restau-rants, television programs, and items for sale. Although the details of various systems differ, content-based recommendation systems share in common a means for describing the items that may be recommended, a means for creating a profile of the user that describes the types of items the user likes, and a means of comparing items to the user profile to determine what to recommend. The user profile is often created and updated automatically in response to feedback on the desirability of items that have been presented to the user.

With the techniques covered in this tutorial you will be able to produce two classic visual effects. First, I'll show you how to make animated titles by importing Photoshop files into Aftereffects. Next we'll add new scenic elements to some video footage, again using Photoshop. This technique will allow you to add or remove elements like tree or buildings from a shot. These techniques, especially the one we will use to alter the scene, are common to most visual effects. Watch the classic old 1933 version of King Kong. Willis O'Brien, the stop motion genius that animated Kong, pioneered the art of extending, or completely fabricating, scenery. Layering several elements painted on glass in front his puppets and rear projected footage allowed O'brien and RKO's visual effects artist Linwood Dunn to create King Kong's fantastic jungle scenes. It is said that these set-ups could be many feet deep.

Current search engines crawl the Web, download content, and digest this content locally. For multimedia content, this involves considerable volumes of data. Furthermore, this process covers only publicly available content because content providers are concerned that they otherwise loose control over the distribution of their intellectual property. We present the prototype of our secure and distributed search engine, which dynamically pushes content based feature extraction to image providers. Thereby, the volume of data that is transported over the network is significantly reduced, and the concerns mentioned above are alleviated. The distribution of feature extraction and matching algorithms is done by mobile software agents. Subsequent search requests performed upon the resulting feature indices by means of remote feature comparison can either be realized through mobile software agents, or by the use of implicitly created Web services which wrap the remote comparison functionality, and thereby improve the interoperability of the search engine. We give a description of the search engine's architecture and implementation, depict our concepts to integrate agent and Web service technology, and present quantitative evaluation results. Furthermore, we discuss related security mechanisms for content protection and server security.

Java is the predominant language for mobile agent systems, both for implementing mobile agent execution environments and for writing mobile agent applications. This is due to inherent support for code mobility by means of dynamic class loading and separable class name spaces, as well as a number of security properties, such as language safety and access control by means of stack introspection. However, serious questions must be raised whether Java is actually up to the task of providing a secure execution environment for mobile agents. At the time of writing, it has neither resource control nor proper application separation. In this article we take an in-depth look at Java as a foundation for secure mobile agent systems.