Dynamic path determination policy for distributed multimedia content adaptation

Multimedia content adaptation allows the ever increasing variety of handheld devices such as Smartphones to access distributed rich media resources available on the Internet today. Path planning and determination is a fundamental problem in enhancing performance of distributed multimedia content adaptation systems. Most of the existing path determination mechanisms use static path determination criteria based solely on associating a path with a single behavior aggregate score. However, some criteria such as availability are best represented using different functionality rather than being accumulated into the aggregate score. Moreover, since selection criteria have different behavior towards the score, this principle need to be considered. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multi-criteria path determination policy that selects an optimal path to the content adaptation services that best meet the user preferences and QoS requirements. The performance of the proposed approach is studied in terms of score’s fairness and reliability under different variations. The results indicate that the proposed policy performs substantially better than the baseline policy.

Multimedia content adaptation service discovery mechanism

Electronic information is becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format and style while at the same time client devices are getting increasingly varied in their capabilities. This mismatch between rich contents and the end devices capability presents a challenge in providing seamless and ubiquitous access to electronic documents to interested users. Service-oriented content adaptation has emerged as a potential solution to the content-device mismatch problem. Since an adaptation task can potentially be performed by multiple content adaptation services (CAS), an approach for CAS discovery is a fundamental component of service-oriented content adaptation environment. In this paper, we propose a service discovery approach that considers the client device capability and the service’s attributes to discover appropriate CAS while optimizing performance and functionality. The efficiency of the proposed CAS discovery protocol is studied experimentally. The results show that the proposed discovery approach is effective in terms of discovering appropriate content adaptation services.

An SLA evaluator for multimedia content adaptation services

Content adaptation is used to adapt multimedia content to a version required by users. In the service-oriented scheme, adaptation functions are provided as services by third-party service providers. Clients pay for the consumed services and thus demand service quality. Providers advertise their services; each with varied quality-of-services (QoS). Some of these QoS however, may not be deliverable accordingly during the actual service execution due to heavy load. Thus, the provider should able to determine a current deliverable QoS before the service level agreement (SLA) is settled with the requesters. In this paper, we propose a strategy for service providers to evaluate incoming requests and capable of offering the new QoS to the requests potentially being initially rejected. The proposed strategy takes into account the current server load and requests' priority. We analysed the performance of the proposed strategy in terms of SLA settlement under various conditions. The results indicate that the proposed strategy performs well. © 2014 IEEE.

A classification for content adaptation system

Content adaptation is an attractive solution for the ever growing desktop based Web content delivered to the user via heterogeneous devices, in order to provide acceptable experience while surfing the Web. Bridging the mismatch between the rich content and the user device's resources (display, processing, navigation, network bandwidth, media support) without user intervention requires a proactive behavior. While content adaptation poses multitude of benefits, without proper strategies, adaptation will not be truly optimized. There have been many projects focused on content adaptation that have been designed with different goals and approaches. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive classification for content adaptation system. The classification is used to group the approaches applied in the implementation of existing content adaptation system. Survey on some content adaptation systems also been provided. We also present the research spectrum in content adaptation and discuss the challenges.

Request-driven cross-media content adaptation technique

Devices, standards and software develop rapidly, but still often independently of each other. This creates problems in terms of content suitability on various devices. Also, in mobile environment, user and system-level applications must execute subject to a variety of resource constraints. In order to deal with these constraints, content adaptation is required. In this chapter, we justify the need of distributed cross media content adaptation and the potential of utilizing Web Services as the adaptation providers. We introduce request-driven context to complement constraint-driven and utility-driven approaches. We describe the request context mapping and propose a novel path’s determination scheme for determining the optimal service proxies to facilitate the adaptation tasks. To better illustrate the disjoint portions in content passing between service proxies, two communication models were associated. Then, within Web Services, we explain the related protocols and socket connection between adaptation’s services. We conclude with discussion regarding the strengths of the proposed architecture.

Multi-criteria content adaptation service selection broker

In this paper, we propose a service-oriented content adaptation framework and an approach to the Content Adaptation Service Selection (CASS) problem. In particular, the problem is how to assign adaptation tasks (e.g., transcoding, video summarization, etc) together with respective content segments to appropriate adaptation services. Current systems tend to be mostly centralized suffering from single point failures. The proposed algorithm consists of a greedy and single objective assignment function that is constructed on top of an adaptation path tree. The performance of the proposed service selection framework is studied in terms of efficiency of service selection execution under various conditions. The results indicate that the proposed policy performs substantially better than the baseline approach.

Service discovery for service-oriented content adaptation

Service-Oriented Content Adaptation (SOCA) has emerged as a potential solution to the content-device mismatch problem. One of the key problems with the SOCA scheme is that a content adaptation task can potentially be performed by multiple services. In this paper, we propose an approach to the service discovery problem for SOCA and it is demonstrated to perform well.

A protocol for discovering content adaptation services

Service-oriented content adaptation scheme has emerged to address content adaptation problem. In this scheme, content adaptation functions are provided as services by multiple providers, located across wide area network. To benefit from these services, clients must be able to locate them in the network. This makes service discovery as an important component. In this paper, we propose a service discovery protocol that takes into account searching space, searching time, QoS and physical location of the potential providers. The performance of the proposed protocol is studied in term of discoverability under various conditions and shown to be substantially better than the keyword-based and QoS-based approaches.

Between context-aware media capture and multimedia content analysis - where do we find the promised land?

Various issues related to the multimedia information retrieval and media access are discussed. The feasible solutions for automatic signal-based analysis of media content are analyzed. The extent of user involvement in the content creation process is emphasized. The applications driving the creation and usage of context and metadata are also elaborated.

"You Tube and I Find" - personalizing multimedia content access

Recent growth in broadband access and proliferation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhereVfrom personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, fromcreation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itselfVits affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today’s facility. This integration, transforming the traditional multimedia information retrieval (MIR) indexes to more effectively answer specific user needs, will allow a richer degree of personalization predicated on user intention and mode of interaction, relationship to the producer, content of the media, and their history and lifestyle. In this paper, we identify the challenges in achieving this integration, current approaches to interpreting content creation processes, to user modelling and profiling, and to personalized content selection, and we detail future directions. The structure of the paper is as follows: In Section I, we introduce the problem and present some definitions. In Section II, we present a review of the aspects of personalized content and current approaches for the same. Section III discusses the problem of obtaining metadata that is required for personalized media creation and present eMediate as a case study of an integrated media capture environment. Section IV presents the MAGIC system as a case study of capturing effective descriptive data and putting users first in distributed learning delivery. The aspects of modelling the user are presented as a case study in using user’s personality as a way to personalize summaries in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper with a discussion on the emerging challenges and the open problems.

Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework

Content adaptation bridges the mismatch between rich contents and user preferences along with the end device capability. This thesis addresses five key issues: enabling content adaptation as services; locating and selecting best possible services in the network; and negotiating, providing and managing quality assurance of a service.

Management of service level agreement for service-oriented content adaptation platform

It is paramount to provide seamless and ubiquitous access to rich contents available online to interested users via a wide range of devices with varied characteristics. Recently, a service-oriented content adaptation scheme has emerged to address this content-device mismatch problem. In this scheme, content adaptation functions are provided as services by third-party providers. Clients pay for the consumed services and thus demand service quality. As such, negotiating for the QoS offers, assuring negotiated QoS levels and accuracy of adapted content version are essential. Any non-compliance should be handled and reported in real time. These issues elevate the management of service level agreement (SLA) as an important problem. This chapter presents prior work, important challenges, and a framework for managing SLA for service-oriented content adaptation platform.

Service level agreement management framework for utility-oriented computing platforms

With the increasing popularity of utility-oriented computing where the resources are traded as services, efficient management of quality of service (QoS) has become increasingly significant to both service consumers and service providers. In the context of distributed multimedia content adaptation deployment on service-oriented computing, how to ensure the stringent QoS requirements of the content adaptation is a significant and immediate challenge. However, QoS guarantees in the distributed multimedia content adaptation deployment on service-oriented platform context have not been accorded the attention it deserves. In this paper, we address this problem. We formulate the SLA management for distributed multimedia content adaptation deployment on service-oriented computing as an integer programming problem. We propose an SLA management framework that enables the service provider to determine deliverable QoS before settling SLA with potential service consumers to optimize QoS guarantees. We analyzed the performance of the proposed strategy under various conditions in terms of the SLA success rate, rejection rate and impact of the resource data errors on potential violation of the agreed upon SLA. We also compared the proposed SLA management framework with a baseline approach in which the distributed multimedia content adaptation is deployed on a service-oriented platform without SLA consideration. The results of the experiments show that the proposed SLA management framework substantially outperforms the baseline approach confirming that SLA management is a core requirement for the deployment of distributed multimedia content adaptation on service-oriented systems.

Modelling multilevel data in multimedia : A hierarchical factor analysis approach

Multimedia content understanding research requires rigorous approach to deal with the complexity of the data. At the crux of this problem is the method to deal with multilevel data whose structure exists at multiple scales and across data sources. A common example is modeling tags jointly with images to improve retrieval, classification and tag recommendation. Associated contextual observation, such as metadata, is rich that can be exploited for content analysis. A major challenge is the need for a principal approach to systematically incorporate associated media with the primary data source of interest. Taking a factor modeling approach, we propose a framework that can discover low-dimensional structures for a primary data source together with other associated information. We cast this task as a subspace learning problem under the framework of Bayesian nonparametrics and thus the subspace dimensionality and the number of clusters are automatically learnt from data instead of setting these parameters a priori. Using Beta processes as the building block, we construct random measures in a hierarchical structure to generate multiple data sources and capture their shared statistical at the same time. The model parameters are inferred efficiently using a novel combination of Gibbs and slice sampling. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model in three applications: image retrieval, automatic tag recommendation and image classification. Experiments using two real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms various state-of-the-art related methods.

A digital watermarking scheme for Bezier surfaces

Owners and vendors are increasingly publishing their materials in digital form. Because such materials can be exactly copied, a mechanism is required that will protect the legitimate owners of these works, by providing proof of original ownership. Digital watermarking has now become one accepted method of establishing ownership of digital materials. The owner of a work embeds a pattern, called a digital watermark, in the content. This embedded watermark is normally undetectable, but its presence can be demonstrated by the owner of the work or his agent, thereby proving ownership. Digital watermarking has been used for many types of multimedia content, primarily audio, video and flat images. Recently, interest has been shown in applying digital watermarking schemes to 3D surfaces, in various formats. In this paper, we examine a method whereby a digital watermark can be embedded in a Bezier surface. A prototype watermarking method for such surfaces is presented, with some experimental results, and a discussion of directions for future research.