multimedia presentation

We present a complete system for distance learning over interactive TV with novel tools for authoring and presentation of lectures and exams, and evaluation of student and system performance. The main technological contributions of the paper include the development of plug-in software so that PowerPoint can be used to prepare presentations for the set-top-box, a software tool to convert PDF documents containing multiplechoice questions into interactive exams, and a virtual teacher whose facial animation is automatically generated from speech.

Distributed multimedia documents systems, distributed video servers are examples of multimedia presentations involving collaboration among multiple information sources. In such applications, objects have to be retrieved from their sources and presented to users according to specified temporal relationships. Objects retrieval in these collaborative applications is influenced by their presentation times, durations, and network throughput available to their sources. Replication of objects amongst the set of collaborating systems gives a choice for object retrieval. In this paper, we present a graph-search based algorithm for computing and negotiating throughput requirements of collaborating multimedia presentations with replicated objects. This algorithm optimizes the number of cached objects (that have already been played) for handling operations like reverse presentation.

textabstractThe paper introduces a knowledge-based multimedia approach to multimedia information retrieval. The approach uses domain knowledge to augment a user' s query, performs automatic ontology mapping to search different multimedia databases, and combines the results in a multimedia presentation. The texts in the presentation are generated from the domain knowledge. Thus, the user can view a coherent multimedia presentation that contains the answer to his or her query. The paper describes an architecture for realizing the approach. The individual parts of the architecture have been implemented, but are not yet integrated in one system.

Presentation models are used by intelligent user interfaces to automatically construct adapted presentations according to particular communication goals. This paper describes the characteristics of a presentation model that was designed to automatically produce multimedia presentations about the summarized behavior of dynamic systems. The presentation model is part of the MSB application (Multimedia Summarizer of Behavior). MSB was developed for the

Multimedia presentations are applicable in various domains such as distance learning. Since multimedia documents may comprise continous médias, the presentation of those documents may require vast system resources due to the huge amount of data and to their QoS restraints. The avaiability of resources in a distributed environment at

With the advancement in cell phone technologies and its increased use as a multimedia platform, we can extend its application to enhance the experience of museum visitors. Smart phones can be used to provide full personalized multimedia presentations ...

This paper proposes an object-oriented data model which integrates structural and temporal aspects for different kinds of (multimedia) data. These data include traditional atomic types as integers, reals, or character strings together with programs, textual, visual and audio information as they appear in several new application fields (e.g. CAD/CAM, geographical and medical databases). We claim that object oriented database systems have to be extended in order to provide powerful capabilities for modeling, storing and retrieving multimedia data which have not only particular complex structure but also specific temporal constraints. In this paper we propose to integrate structural operators (e.g. tuple, list, set) and temporal relationships (e.g. before, after, equal) for multimedia databases. Temporal aspects are modeled through the notion of Temporal Shadow which incorporates free or bound durations and/or delays. Our model, called STORM, provides sequential and parallel operators which can be applied to any database object and which can also be used at the schema level. An implementation on top of an Object-Oriented DBMS is also discussed.

Multimedia presentation databases Definition A multimedia presentation consists of a set of media objects (such as images, text objects, video clips, and audio streams) presented in accordance with various temporal constraints specifying when the object should be presented, and spatial constraints specifying where the object should be presented on a screen. Today, multimedia presentations range from the millions of PowerPoint presentations users have created the world over, to more sophisticated presentations authored using tools such as Macromedia Director. Multimedia presentation databases provide the mechanisms needed to store, access, index, and query such collections of multimedia presentations.

Currently, multimedia presentation technologies among the network are most often used in many communication services. Examples of those applications include video-on demand, interactive TV and the communication tools on a distance learning system and so on. In this paper, we describe how to present different multimedia objects on a web presentation system. The distributed approach is based on an extended timed Petri net model. Using characterization of extended time Petri net, we express the temporal behavior of multimedia objects; on the other hand, we introduce the concepts of user interaction. The main goal of our system is to provide a feasible method to represent a schedule and navigation of different multimedia objects with user interaction. In addition, users can dynamically modify and verify different kinds of conditions during the presentation. To verify the structural mechanism, we implement an algorithm using the Petri net diagram, analyzing the model by time schedule of ...

This paper presents a multi-agent educational multimedia system for the school course in Natural Sciences. Three animated characters (Teacher, Schoolboy and Schoolgirl) take a virtual tour in order to learn basic Physical and Chemical phenomena and concepts. The paper also describes the authoring environment NATURA and scripting language NML that were developed for creating this multimedia system.

Most of the multimedia objects distributed over the World-Wide Web are unstructured or poorly meta-indexed to be of any use in retrieval tasks formulated by users in natural language queries. In general these dynamic multimedia objects are manually annotated in terms of textual documents. The high costs involved in manually indexing multimedia objects, which grow in volume and are becoming ever more diverse in type, call for automatic sustainable categorization schemata that are accesible and operational on the Web. These categorization schemata comprise indexing, querying and retrieval schemata. We propose a webenabled advanced multimedia system as a solution to this categorization problem. We lay bare the physical, mathematical and logical framework underlying our system. We demonstrate that this system pays off especially in semantically user-defined summarisation tasks concerning multimedia presentations.

Facing to the multi-media explosion, it is necessary to develop new information access methods which allow both fast and natural information access. To take into account this aspect for multimedia presentations, it needs to implement a graphical interface facilitating the cross, the search and the visualization of the medias. Moreover, this interface must answer the readers aspirations for both conviviality and easy use. This article presents an interface paper for multimedia presentations and proposes an indexing method for exploration on the WEB.

Usually, students learn more if the method of instruction matches their learning style. Since Physics and Chemistry deal with three-dimensional (3-D) objects, the ability to visualize and mentally manipulate shapes is very helpful in their learning. In fact, much of what ...

When viewing multimedia presentations, a user only attends to a relatively small part of the video display at any one point in time. By shifting allocation of bandwidth from peripheral areas to those locations where a user's gaze is more likely to rest, attentive displays can be produced. Attentive displays aim to reduce resource requirements while minimizing negative user perception-understood in this paper as not only a user's ability to assimilate and understand information but also his/her subjective satisfaction with the video content. This paper introduces and discusses a perceptual comparison between two region-of-interest display (RoID) adaptation techniques. A RoID is an attentive display where bandwidth has been preallocated around measured or highly probable areas of user gaze. In this paper, video content was manipulated using two sources of data: empirical measured data (captured using eye-tracking technology) and predictive data (calculated from the physical characteristics of the video data). Results show that display adaptation causes significant variation in users' understanding of specific multimedia content. Interestingly, RoID adaptation and the type of video being presented both affect user perception of video quality. Moreover, the use of frame rates less than 15 frames per second, for any video adaptation technique, caused a significant reduction in user perceived quality, suggesting that although users are aware of video quality reduction, it does impact level of information assimilation and understanding. Results also highlight that user level of enjoyment is significantly affected by the type of video yet is not as affected by the quality or type of video adaptation-an interesting implication in the field of entertainment. Index Terms-Attentive displays, eye tracking, perceptual quality, region of interest (RoI).

Mobile intelligent multimedia presentation systems are subject to various resource constraints including mobile network characteristics, mobile device capabilities and user preferences. Those presentation systems which incorporate remote multimedia content accessed across HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) or RTP (Real Time Transfer Protocol) protocols are particularly reliant on the capabilities of the connecting mobile network (i.e. minimum, average and maximum bandwidth) and in particular on the real-time constraints (i.e. currently available bandwidth, packet loss, bit error rate, latency) which prevail during actual content transmission. One approach to address this is to scale content, thus reducing its datarate requirement, although this technique is inherently limited by the lowest acceptable quality of that media element. Alternatively, content can be converted from one modality to another with a lower resource requirement. TeleMorph, a cross-modality adaptation control platform is detailed here. Initially a brief introduction to Intelligent Multimedia and to Mobile Intelligent Multimedia is given, and key systems discussed. The main premise of TeleMorph is that cross-modality adaptations in mobile presentation systems must be controlled in a manner which gives primary consideration to bandwidth fluctuations as well as the constraints listed above. The current prototype of TeleMorph, which uses a fuzzy inference system to control cross-modality adaptations between video and audio, is described. Particular focus is given to the fuzzy inputs, fuzzy control rules and fuzzy outputs which have been utilised in decision making. TeleTuras, a tourist information application which has been implemented as a testbed for TeleMorph, gives promising evaluation results based on multimedia and bandwidth specific test scenarios. TeleMorph is related to other approaches in the area of Mobile Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems. TeleMorph differs from

The methodology demonstrated in this paper suggests a way how to efficiently develop multimedia presentations and deliver them to improve the teaching impact whilst not unnecessarily wasting the time and resources. The effectiveness of teaching processes can be improved by implementing an alternative to conventional presentations. The role of multimedia in teaching is considerable as it offers various information presentation formats simultaneously. The combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video and interactivity, as well as hyperlinks has an advantage of using both of the two main channels (visual and verbal) for presentation in an efficient way. It is capable of reducing the overall cognitive effort for given amount of presented information. The advantageous features can be applied in process integration courses as well, both on student and presenter side.

When viewing multimedia presentations, a user only attends to a relatively small part of the video display at any one point in time. By shifting allocation of bandwidth from peripheral areas to those locations where a user's gaze is more likely to rest, attentive displays can be produced. Attentive displays aim to reduce resource requirements while minimizing negative user perception-understood in this paper as not only a user's ability to assimilate and understand information but also his/her subjective satisfaction with the video content. This paper introduces and discusses a perceptual comparison between two region-of-interest display (RoID) adaptation techniques. A RoID is an attentive display where bandwidth has been preallocated around measured or highly probable areas of user gaze. In this paper, video content was manipulated using two sources of data: empirical measured data (captured using eye-tracking technology) and predictive data (calculated from the physical characteristics of the video data). Results show that display adaptation causes significant variation in users' understanding of specific multimedia content. Interestingly, RoID adaptation and the type of video being presented both affect user perception of video quality. Moreover, the use of frame rates less than 15 frames per second, for any video adaptation technique, caused a significant reduction in user perceived quality, suggesting that although users are aware of video quality reduction, it does impact level of information assimilation and understanding. Results also highlight that user level of enjoyment is significantly affected by the type of video yet is not as affected by the quality or type of video adaptation-an interesting implication in the field of entertainment. Index Terms-Attentive displays, eye tracking, perceptual quality, region of interest (RoI).

This paper investigates a novel active buffer management scheme, "Jitter Detection" (JD) for gateway-based congestion control to stream multimedia traffics in packet-switched networks. The quality of multimedia presentation can be greatly degraded due to network delay variation or jitter when transported over a packet-switched network. Jitter degrades the timing relationship among packets in a single media stream and between packets from different media streams and, hence, creates multimedia synchronization problems. Moreover, too much jitter will also degrade the performance of the streaming buffer in the client. Packets received by the client will be rendered useless if they have accumulated enough jitter. The proposed active buffer management scheme will improve the quality of service in multimedia networking by detecting and discarding packets that accumulated enough jitter, such as to maintain a high bandwidth for packets within the multimedia stream's jitter tolerance. Simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme can effectively lower the average received packet jitter and increase the goodput of the received packets when compared to random early detection (RED) and DropTail used in gateway-based congestion control. Furthermore, simulation results have also revealed that the proposed scheme can maintain the same TCP friendliness when compared to that of RED and DropTail used for multimedia streams.

The work of the Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group (OHSWG) has lead to the creation of several hypermedia models and a common protocol for Navigational Hypertext. However none of these include a working model of context. In this paper we present how we have extended the Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM) to include context and behaviour. We then present Auld Leaky, a lightweight contextual link server that stores and serves structures represented in FOHM, using Context to filter query results.

Abstract--This paper presents implementations of two MPEG-4 Streaming scenarios (remote retrieval and broadcast) for the delivery of multiple elementary stream presentations containing audio-visual objects. These systems have been tested with the MPEG-4 demonstration software implementation (IM1), but are in fact generic platforms for multimedia presentation delivery. The signalling and delivery layer of these system implementations conform to the recommendations made by part 6 of the MPEG-4 standard ...