The last stage of any type of automatic surveillance system is the interpretation of the acquired information from the sensors. This work focuses on the interpretation of motion pictures taken from a surveillance camera, i.e.; image understanding. An expert system is presented which can describe in a natural language like, simple human activity in the field of view of a surveillance camera. The...

This paper focuses on the problems how to organize and retrieve video data in an effective manner. First we identify several issues to be solved for the problems. Next, we overview our current research results together with a brief survey in the research area of video databases. We especially describe the following research results obtained by the the Japanese Ministry of Education under Grant-...

Making a photo book as a special gift to your beloved can be very time-consuming. One has to carefully select and arrange the pictures nicely over the pages of a previously bought photo book. In these days, photo finisher companies are able to directly print and bind a nice photo book from a selected set of images. But for the users of the software that comes with the album creation, the select...

We present a novel technique for the recognition of complex human gestures for video annotation using accelerometers and the hidden Markov model. Our extension to the standard hidden Markov model allows us to consider gestures at different levels of abstraction through a hierarchy of hidden states. Accelerometers in the form of wrist bands are attached to humans performing intentional gestures,...

Video annotation provides a suitable way to describe, organize, and index stored videos. On the other hand, transcoding aims at adapting content to the user/client capabilities and requirements. Both cues are now mandatory, given the tremendous demand of multimedia access from remote clients, in particular nowadays that new terminals with limited resources (PDAs, HCCs, Smart phones) have access...

a r t i c l e i n f o Fully automatic annotation of tennis game using broadcast video is a task with a great potential but with enormous challenges. In this paper we describe our approach to this task, which integrates computer vision, machine listening, and machine learning. At the low level processing, we improve upon our previously proposed state-of-the-art tennis ball tracking algorithm and...

This paper discusses the efficiency of a compression scheme for video sequences that jointly encodes groups of pictures. Our approach, motion-compensated transform coding, applies a KLT to decorrelate a set of motion-compensated pictures for efficient encoding. The theoretical investigation utilizes a signal model for inaccurate motion compensation and provides a performance comparison to motio...

In this paper we describe how to use a mobile robot to take pictures automatically to be used in image rendering applications. A potential fields algorithm is used to control the movements of a mobile robot with a video camera that it takes photographs of the environment, and with them panoramic pictures are created. Then, a navigable website is created by making a movie with the superposition ...

We propose a rate-distortion optimized video frame dropping strategy that can be applied on active network nodes in case of heavy traffic load. Our approach relies on side information that is sent along with the video bit-streams. The side information consists of a rate vector containing the frame size (in bytes) of every picture as well as a distortion matrix describing the reconstruction dist...