This is the last left-field column of 2008 and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year and a happy holidays, looking forward to meeting again in 2009 with a lot of interesting left-field articles! A new workshop grabbed my attention in the ACM DL - "Proceeding of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams AREA '08". I think all the papers in this proceeding would be interesting to people working on video accessibility, however I wanted to highlight one which is called "Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system". This paper presents an expert system that encodes seven rules to represent and detect seven predefined events. These events represent dangerous situations in a subway station such as someone being trapped by the door of a moving train. I wonder if such systems would be used to inform blind users about the dangerous situations in the environment.

Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system

Video Surveillance is in the center of research due to high importance of safety and security issues. Usually, humans have to monitor an area and often they have to do this for 24 hours a day. Thus, it would be desirable to have automatic surveillance systems that support this job automatically. The system described in this paper is such an automatic surveillance system that has been developed to detect several dangerous situations in a subway station. This paper discusses the high-level module of the system. Herein, an expert system is used to detect events.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463542.1463551
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams, 2008.

Labels: accessibility, video, workshop

A paper that can be extremely useful for people working on video accessibility. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the research in video abstraction. Although the focus is on the importance of abstraction for effective and efficient access of large volumes of video content, video abstraction can also be very useful for disabled users. Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification
The demand for various multimedia applications is rapidly increasing due to the recent advance in the computing and network infrastructure, together with the widespread use of digital video technology. Among the key elements for the success of these applications is how to effectively and efficiently manage and store a huge amount of audio visual information, while at the same time providing user-friendly access to the stored data. This has fueled a quickly evolving research area known as video abstraction. As the name implies, video abstraction is a mechanism for generating a short summary of a video, which can either be a sequence of stationary images (keyframes) or moving images (video skims). In terms of browsing and navigation, a good video abstract will enable the user to gain maximum information about the target video sequence in a specified time constraint or sufficient information in the minimum time. Over past years, various ideas and techniques have been proposed towards the effective abstraction of video contents. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic classification of these works. We identify and detail, for each approach, the underlying components and how they are addressed in specific works. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1198302.1198305 Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP), Vol. 3, No. 1, Article 3, February 2007.

Labels: abstraction, review, survey, video