New paper accepted in ICPR 2014 – “Compact Signature-based Compressed Video Matching Using Dominant Colour Profiles (DCP)”

The paper “Compact Signature-based Compressed Video Matching Using Dominant Colour Profiles (DCP)” has been accepted in the ICPR 2014 conference http://www.icpr2014.org/, and will be presented in August 2014, Stockholm, Sweden.

Abstract— This paper presents a technique for efficient and generic matching of compressed video shots, through compact signatures extracted directly without decompression. The compact signature is based on the Dominant Colour Profile (DCP); a sequence of dominant colours extracted and arranged as a sequence of spikes, in analogy to the human retinal representation of a scene. The proposed signature represents a given video shot with ~490 integer values, facilitating for real-time processing to retrieve a maximum set of matching videos. The technique is able to work directly on MPEG compressed videos, without full decompression, as it is utilizing the DC-image as a base for extracting colour features. The DC-image has a highly reduced size, while retaining most of visual aspects, and provides high performance compared to the full I-frame. The experiments and results on various standard datasets show the promising performance, both the accuracy and the efficient computation complexity, of the proposed technique.

Congratulations and well done for Saddam.

Analysis and experimentation results of using DC-image, and comparisons with full image (I-Frame), can be found in  Video matching using DC-image and local features   (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/12680/)

 

 

Amjad Altadmri – PhD

Amjad Altadmri has passed his PhD viva, subject to minor amendments, earlier today.

Thesis Title:  “Semantic Video Annotation in Domain-Independent Videos Utilising Similarity and Commonsense Knowledgebases

Thanks to the external, Dr John Wood from the University of Essex, the internal Dr Bashir Al-Diri and the viva chair, Dr Kun Guo.

Congratulations and Well done.

All colleagues are invited to join Amjad on celebrating his achievement, tomorrow (Thursday 28th Feb) at 12:00noon, in our meeting room MC3108, with some drinks and light refreshments available.

Best wishes.

New Journal paper Accepted to the “Multimedia Tools and Applications”

New Journal paper accepted for publishing in the Journal of “Multimedia Tools and Applications“.

The paper title is “A Framework for Automatic Semantic Video Annotation utilising Similarity and Commonsense Knowledgebases

Abstract:

The rapidly increasing quantity of publicly available videos has driven research into developing automatic tools for indexing, rating, searching and retrieval. Textual semantic representations, such as tagging, labelling and annotation, are often important factors in the process of indexing any video, because of their user-friendly way of representing the semantics appropriate for search and retrieval. Ideally, this annotation should be inspired by the human cognitive way of perceiving and of describing videos. The difference between the low-level visual contents and the corresponding human perception is referred to as the ‘semantic gap’. Tackling this gap is even harder in the case of unconstrained videos, mainly due to the lack of any previous information about the analyzed video on the one hand, and the huge amount of generic knowledge required on the other.

This paper introduces a framework for the Automatic Semantic Annotation of unconstrained videos. The proposed framework utilizes two non-domain-specific layers: low-level visual similarity matching, and an annotation analysis that employs commonsense knowledgebases. Commonsense ontology is created by incorporating multiple-structured semantic relationships. Experiments and black-box tests are carried out on standard video databases for
action recognition and video information retrieval. White-box tests examine the performance of the individual intermediate layers of the framework, and the evaluation of the results and the statistical analysis show that integrating visual similarity matching with commonsense semantic relationships provides an effective approach to automated video annotation.

 

Well done and congratulations to Amjad Altadmri .

(iNET) Intelligent Mobility: Making it a Commercial Reality – National Space Centre

 
Amr Presenting a Poster at the National Space Centre, Leicester. iNET Transport, Mobility Scooter with Navigation System

Amr Ahmed has been invited for this iNET Transport event at the National Space Centre, as has been a partner in one of the iNET Transport projects. During the day, Amr presented a Poster, with support from Tony Daniel, about his iNET project; Mobility Scooter with navigation system (Demo video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQm4GKfgN0 and list of Projects at http://amrahmed.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/projects/ )

 

 

Amr Presenting a Poster at the National Space Centre, Leicester. iNET Transport, Mobility Scooter with Navigation System
National Space Centre - Leicester

V&L Network workshop, Brighton

Dr Amr Ahmed attended the Vision & Language Netowork Workshop in Brighton last Thursday 15th September, where 2 posters and oral presentation were presented from the DCAPI group.

DCAPI poster at the V&L Network workshop - Sept'11 - Brighton
DCAPI poster at the V&L workshop

 

Over 40 researchers, from vision and language areas, attended and it was a good opportunity for networking and exchange of contacts and ideas. Posters and sides will be available on the network’s website in the near future

Amr and a keynote speaker
Amr and a keynote speaker
Amr and a keynote speaker
Amr and one of the keynote speaker

 

Mr Amjad Altadmri also attended and presented in the event.

Some nice photos in Brighton,

Amr in Brighton Pier
Amr in Brighton Pier

with some Icereame! 🙂

ECM9 and Audit meeting for SUS-IT project

Dr Amr Ahmed participated in the 9th Executive Committe Meeting (ECM) of his SUS-IT project, at Loughborough, on 9th Septmeber. This was immediately followed by an Audit meeting with an NDA representative.

Very interesting to see the work of such a large consortium coming together during the final year of the project, with experienced researchers/professors.  An excellent experience.

SandPit 4 B – SUS-IT project

Amr participated in the 2nd part of the SandPit 4 event within his SUS-IT project (funded by the NDA program, 5 research councils). One of the interesting topics is around how help (automated/semi-automated…) provided to elderly while using ICT to enable them to stay longer and have better life style at their own homes.

The 1st part was held earlier in July.

ECM of the SUS-IT Project

Amr attended the Executive Committee Meeting of the SUS-IT project (as a partner and Lincoln’s PI in the SUS-IT Project), in Loughborough earlier in June.

Leaders of workpackages represented progress and findings so far, in supporting elderly people, and the plan for the remaining part of the project.