Showcases:

The goal of this showcase is to bring together and demonstrate the wide range of semantic analysis and annotation capabilities that are present within MUSCLE. Based on contributions from the participants, a video data base was compiled from TV short recordings of different genres (e.g. news reports, music clips, commercials, etc.). These were integrated and shared by all team members as well as provided in the evaluation web portal.

Showcase participants will perform whatever semantic extraction and analysis (single or multimodal) they can apply to the videos, such as all kinds of low-level feature extraction, face detection, moving objects, fire and smoke detection, logo detection, music genre analysis, music segment clustering, speech recognition, text detection and recognition, etc. To achieve this, partners are allowed to use all kind of algorithms, additional external information, as well as additional data they may have and use within their own labs to enhance the information extracted from the video.

The CASEWP web portal is particularly meant to evaluate results of temporal segmentation tools. The web portal will provide all the necessary environment resources (e.g. free data sets and annotations) and will enable evaluations of state-of-the-art methods outside the constrained timelines of scientific evaluation campaigns. The goal here is to propose an online evaluation tool to the research community, which objectively measure various temporal segmentation results “on demand”, and which indirectly promote the best technology.

The Showcase has been merged and integrated into the Evaluation Showcase in JPA4.

Results of the showcase demonstrate the wide range of current semantic analysis algorithms developed within MUSCLE on a single common database. Results are available from the Evaluation Showcase page.

In this showcase, EC3 iSpaces and TU Vienna-IFS collaboratively developed a 3D Multimedia Environment where users are impersonated as avatars enabling them to browse and experience multimedia content by literally walking through it. The combination of algorithms from the area of artificial intelligence with state-of-the-art 3D virtual environments creates an intuitive interface that provides access to manually as well as automatically structured multimedia data while allowing to take advantage of spatial metaphors.

This showcase realized two kinds of 3D environments:

The MediaSquare

The MediaSquare, a synthetic 3D multimedia environment, that takes advantage of these spatial metaphors and allows users to explore multimedia information that is structured and organized within space. Users may engage in conversations with other members of the community, exchange experiences or simply enjoy the featured content. The MediaSquare features different scenarios, which enable the user to virtually immerse in multimedia content:

• A 3D Music Showroom that enables users to browse and listen to songs by literally walking through them.
  
• A 3D Image/Video Showroom that enables users to browse and experience visual content such as images and videos
  
• The Muscle Scientific Results Showroom that enables users to explore the scientific results (i.e. documents such as Posters, paper abstracts, etc...) of Muscle in an immersive 3D environment.
  

The prototype client for exploring and experiencing the 3D Multimedia Enviroment was presented at the CeBIT fair March 15 - 21, 2007 in Hannover, Germany and at the IBC in Amsterdam, September 7-11, 2007.

MUSCLE in SecondLife

In order to bring scientific research results to a wide public we developed virtual showrooms in the popular online 3D environment SecondLife. Even though SecondLife is quite new, it has already evolved to one of the most common virtual worlds.

Users may engage in conversations with other users, exchange experiences as well as collectively explore and enjoy the featured content. On the one hand, such 3D virtual worlds address the aspect of social interaction by providing instruments to interact and to exchange experiences with other users that go beyond the possibilities of conventional text-based chat rooms. Especially ones inherent presence in space and the awareness of others facilitate the initiation of social contacts. On the other hand, using 3D virtual worlds has the advantage of communicating via commonly accepted spatial metaphors. Beyond these aspects, Virtual MUSCLE allows to browse and experience multimedia content by literally walking through it.

MUSCLE's virtual showrooms in SecondLife provide presentations of scientific results, videos and other (showcase) content developed within MUSCLE:

The MUSCLE virtual showrooms are accessible via: secondlife://MUSCLE/127/127/22.

Virtual MUSCLE SecondLife Showcase video introduction (on youtube)

MUSCLE showroom content management guide


For more details see:

• BEYOND: The Virtual MUSCLE Experience Showcase description page
• Shaping 3-dimensional Multimedia Environments Showcase page
  
• MUSCLE WP4 Deliverables page