This article presents the different steps used to recognize characters for multi-modal person recognition systems in video (ANR REPRE challenge). Text detection is achieved by a technique based on the text features (texture, color, contrast, geometry, temporal information, measure of accumulated gradients). The text recognition is then performed by the free software Google Tesseract. The method...

This paper is about different methods and algorithms that were used for speaker identification from the video recordings of TV broadcast news transcription. The information from visual speaker identification were used in our complex system for automatic continuous speech recognition of TV broadcast programs because it is possible to use speaker adapted (SA) Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) if we hav...

The purpose of this study was to identify and evaluate prosocial content of a local children’s television series News Six produced by WBGU-TV, Bowling Green, Ohio. A stratified random sample of 114 programs (228 news stories) broadcast between 1972-2002 was coded for story setting, theme, prosocial messages, and primary message attributes. Results of a nonfrequency content analysis indicate tha...

Our survey study of 147 Finns shows that online news is becoming the most important news source today: Online newspapers have bypassed paper newspapers and also TV and radio in importance, especially among young adults. Although most respondents routinely visited their preferred news sites directly, recommendations from their social network also played an important role in helping them find sal...

We present a prototype of an interactive multimedia news system featuring a talking virtual character to present the news on the Web. Talking virtual characters are graphical simulations of real or imaginary persons capable of human-like behavior, most importantly talking and gesturing. In our system a virtual character is used as a newscaster, reading the news on the Web while at the same time...

The article deals with a study of both short-term and long-term influence of massmedia upon a concept of danger (CD). Subjective concepts of danger (CD) were revealed by means of the authors “Assessment of Dangerous Situations” Questionnaire and a new classification of such concepts was developed. Demonstrated are differences in CD of men and women, as well as specific traits of CD transformati...

Speaker diarization aims to detect “who spoke when” in large audio segments. It is an important task in processing of broadcast news audio, making easier the audio segments selection and indexing task. In this paper an unsupervised speaker diarization scheme is proposed using a Gaussian Mixture Model as a Universal Background Model, Bayesian Information Criterion and fingerprint detection. A de...

Time was when scientists didn’t need to track many media to know how science was being presented to the public. True science buffs read magazines like Science News or Scientific American, or watched Jacques Cousteau specials on TV. But the average person heard only about sensational discoveries and was rarely exposed to how research was done or what day-to-day science was like. Then, during the...