Research

In recent years, our research has concentrated on distributed multimedia, with special emphasis on  self-organizing content delivery; video calculus, a formal framework for handling non-sequential video delivery; video exploration: interactive and immediate extraction of semantics from videos; non-sequential video presentation; fast video analysis based on H.264 video encoding; social computing, metadata and semantics in multimedia;  languages, compilers and frameworks for QoS aware applications.

  • Self-organizing content delivery
  • Interactive image and video search
  • Multimedia content visualization
  • Social aspects of multimedia information systems
  • User-centered multimedia information retrieval
  • Creating summaries and stories out of large social events
  • Applications in the medical domain (endoscopy) and in traffic surveillancens

 

Current projects @ Distributed Multimedia Systems Group

 

  • Next-Generation Video Browsing (NGVB) 
    Funded by: FWF, the Austrian Science Fund, Austria’s central funding organization for basic research
    Description: Video browsing is known as the interactive process of quickly navigating through the content of a video in an explorative fashion. In difference to video retrieval the purpose of video browsing is manifold: (1) get a quick overview of the content of a video and its structure, (2) find out where potentially interesting segments are located, and (3) interactively search for a specific part of content that cannot be found through video retrieval applications. A typical video browsing tool is a common video player that allows for quick exploration of the content of a video through a seeker‐bar (also known as time‐slider)and fast‐forward/reverse features. However, although video players can be used immediately after recording (i.e., require no time for content analysis) they don’t provide advanced browsing and navigation features. In contrast, they offer conventional browsing features that were invented together with the traditional video cassette recorders (VCR) more than 40 years ago. Therefore, a remarkable amount of research has been performed in the past in order to enable video browsing that allows for more efficient interactive search in videos. A recent review of video browsing tools can be found in our journal paper.

    Employees: DI Dr. Claudiu Cobarzan, DI Marco A. Hudelist

  • Community of Domain Experts in Medical Multimedia (CodeMM)        
    Funded by:
    Karl Storz GmbH & Co KG, European Regional Development Fund and the Carinthian Economic Promotion Fund (KWF) with support of the Lakeside Labs GmbH

    Description: Collaborative knowledge in big communities (known as Wisdom of the crowds) and self-organization of huge amounts of networked participants have shown a lot of potential in various fields of computer science and information systems. Still, there are many scenarios, in particular in highly professional applications, where a critical mass of users (experts) is not available to safely create this knowledge. In several scenarios a top down model providing generally agreed domain knowledge can be used as common ground for communication. However, for other scenarios, diversity in terms of interest, motivation, information need, and many other characteristics prevent top down approaches, for which an à-priori-consensus between participating members must be found. Within this project we focus on small and medium sized groups of people, who have common interests but are too diverse for applying a commonly agreed model and who are bound to use multimedia systems to satisfy their needs. Further, we consider these people being experts with intense domain knowledge, such as medical doctors. Based on the CODE-MM Lakeside Labs project, which is conducted in addition to an ongoing applied research project funded directly by our project partner, we aim at consolidating and fostering basic and applied research competence in multimedia information systems for medical scenarios. If successful,  a number of exciting scientific and economic opportunities will unfold. Long term goal is the establishment of a center of expertise in this field – at least partially funded by our partner – or of a new company dedicated to industry-oriented development and research and world-wide delivery of software tools for medical multimedia information systems.

    Employees: DI Dr. Manfred del Fabro, DI Manfred Jürgen Primus, DI Mario Guggenberger

     

  • Endoscopic Video Processing (ENDOVIP) 
    Funded by:
    Karl Storz GmbH & Co KG

    Description: In recent years, digital images and videos of endoscopic screenings and surgical operations are recorded and archived by physicians with increasing frequency. The reason is that interventions can be documented in a much more expressive and informative way than with textual descriptions only. But an extensive, naive usage of endoscopic videos leads to huge amounts of video data that can easily exceed the storage capacity of hospital operators. Moreover, it is a very cumbersome task to retrieve specific information from such a large data set without efficient tools that are tailored to this very specific domain. Therefore, the purpose of EndoViP is to investigate how this video data can be significantly reduced without losing any important information. This involves the  development of efficient encoding strategies as well as the automatic  identification of irrelevant scenes by means of content-based analysis methods. If irrelevant scenes are omitted and only the actually relevant scenes remain, also the browsing and retrieval performance can be improved considerably. In this context, novel mechanisms for time-efficient retrospective viewing and retrieval of specific relevant scenes will also be investigated.

    Employees: Mag. DI Bernd Münzer

 

 

Completed projects (Selected)

  • UniKluHiStories
    Funded by: Privatstiftung der Kärntner Sparkasse
    In Cooperation with: Institut für Geschichte, Uni Services Kulturagenden, Institut für Interventionsforschung und Kulturelle Nachhaltigkeit, Klagenfurt University
    Duration: 01.04.2011 – 31.03.2012
  • GeoMT
    Funded by: Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
    Duration: 01.04.2006 – 31.03.2008

 

Further information is available on the website of the research group!