ABSTRACT

Contents 19.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568 19.2 Multimedia Content Analysis for TV programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570

19.2.1 Visual Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 19.2.1.1 Low-Level Feature Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 19.2.1.2 Semantic-Level Feature Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573

19.2.2 Aural Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574 19.2.3 ROI Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577

19.2.3.1 Region Segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578 19.2.3.2 Spatial ROI Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579

19.2.3.3 Temporal ROI Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 19.3 Virtual Content Analysis and Media Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581

19.3.1 Virtual Content Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 582 19.3.1.1 Characterization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 582 19.3.1.2 Behavior Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585

19.3.2 Media Representation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589 19.3.2.1 Animation Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589 19.3.2.2 Layer Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 590

19.4 Prototype of Interactive Virtual Content Insertion and Its Possible Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591 19.4.1 Virtual Interactive Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592 19.4.2 Virtual Learning e-Partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592

19.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 595

19.1 Introduction Over the years, the rapid technical advances in multimedia compression and broadband network delivery have led to a huge amount of multimedia content created and distributed. With the advanced digital TV technologies and easy-to-use electrical devices, for example, digital cameras, digital camcorders, and smart phones, creating multimedia contents will no longer be peculiar to the professionals and power users. In addition, with dramatically boosted social media services, such as YouTube, AudioBoo, Flickr, Facebook, Plurk, and so on, people can easily create, share, and watch tremendous amounts of multimedia contents in their daily lives. Therefore, people can access rich multimedia content through various media easily. In order to attract more viewers, the TV programs should be refined to be more interesting and useful according to different requirements of various types of TV services (e.g., advertising, education, or entertainment, etc.). Nowadays, users can shape their vivid personal lives via the uniqueness, creativity, and interest of their own multimedia contents and thereby share experiences and knowledge with each other. This phenomenon of personal branding has become a popular culture trend and the market now pays high attention to the latent yet amazing economic benefits of advertising that accompanied with the trend. Besides advertising, digital TV service is also opening up opportunities for interactive learning services to reach mass audiences. It is popular to record the lecture as a digital video for efficient distribution through the Internet. However, general lectures take at least 1 h and will produce a large video file. Consequently, it becomes difficult for learners to browse the lecture content efficiently. In addition, while watching the traditional lecture video, students usually feel bored because it lacks interaction with the teacher or classmates. Therefore, additional interactive content should be incorporated in the self-paced learning environment to help students learn efficiently.