In this paper we introduce our visual explorer “Blockbuster” as a contribution to the InfoVis Contest 2007. The system’s development followed a user-centered design process and a design rationale considering not only the pragmatic qualities of the system, but also hedonic qualities like aesthetics or “joy-of-use”. Apart from briefly outlining the employed visualization techniques, we will focus...

Motion picture Special effects often require the segmentation of image sequences into foreground and background. The background and foreground may then be processed separately and and recombined, perhaps with additional elements in the scene. Alpha Estimation Systems can perform this segmentation where the background is natural (rather than an artificial background such as a blue screen) but th...

In this paper, we propose a semi-blind video watermarking scheme, where we use pseudo-random robust semiglobal features of video in the spatially wavelet transform domain. We design the watermark sequence via solving an optimization problem, such that the features of the mark-embedded video are the quantized versions of the features of the original video. We use a novel approach in generating t...

In this paper we apply stochastic methods (Gibbs sampling and simulated annealing) and deterministic (mean eld) approximations to the problem of detecting and interpolating`dirt and sparkle' or`blotches' in archived motion pictures.

This study examines how consumers’ interest in a new movie develops around paid and earned media in pre-launch periods, how this interest impacts opening-week revenue, and how postlaunch revenue of a movie is influenced by advertising and various earned media. The prelaunch, opening-week and post-launch worlds are structurally different and we therefore develop three separate models, two multip...

Motion picture industry is characterized by extensive advertising and word-of-mouth among (potential) consumers. We develop a simple computational model of consumer behavior to study the interaction between these two forces. WOM that propagates through fixed social network is affected by the mismatch between consumer’s expectations and realized quality of the film. As a result, intensive advert...

A new method to detect and track an object having a unique movement out of general moving background comprised of a number of moving areas is reported here. After an overall picture movement is detected and normalized from local movements of an image, the moving object becomes detectable by applying a time sequential processing on the difference between frames. Thus, the detection of moving obj...

Horse eosinophil function has been studied in vitro by means of phase contrast cinemicrophotography. Locomotion of horse eosinophils was inhibited by serum factors reacting with glass surfaces. Under appropriate conditions which eliminated this inhibitory effect, eosinophils moved about and ingested some particles as rapidly as did neutrophils. Eosinophils were attracted to and readily engulfed...

Video Object (VO) extraction is of great importance in multimedia processing. In recent years approaches have been proposed to deal with VO extraction as a classification problem. This method calls for state-of-the-art classifiers because the performance is directly related to the accuracy of classification. Promising results have been reported for single object extraction using Support Vector ...