Archives for January 2012

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The project focus for these weeknotes is LIMO where we have been investigating timed interactive media to support video using HTML5. This work was conducted as part of the P2P-Next collaborative project in which BBC R&D is a partner.

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The Digital Service Development group led by Phil Layton in BBC R&D was involved in the previous trial of 3D at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships this year and also the recently broadcast Strictly Come Dancing Grand Final. In this post Dr Peter Cherriman outlines the work to produce 2D compatible 3D broadcasts for Freeview and Freesat receivers.

The BBC has been trialling 3D broadcasting over the last year. While 3D content is an interesting development in television, it creates a number of challenging problems for existing 2D receivers in the market.

In order to allow the introduction of 3D broadcasting with the minimum changes to existing systems and receivers, the DVB broadcasting specifications allow 3D content to be broadcast as HD video. The stereoscopic video is merged into a single HD frame by anamorphically compressing the view for each eye into half of the HD frame. This 'frame compatible' video can then be transmitted on a separate 3D channel or broadcast as part of a 2D HD channel.

Launching a separate 3D channel does reduce some of the legacy 2D receiver issues. However, such a channel would require a significant amount of 3D content and the cost of finding additional capacity. The BBC has broadcast its 3D trials on an existing 2D channel, the BBC HD channel.

Our trial 3D broadcasts started with the Wimbledon Singles Finals and then the Strictly Come Dancing Final before Christmas. These programmes were all broadcast in 3D on the BBC HD channel. Viewers without 3D televisions were able to watch a simulcast in 2D on BBC One or BBC One HD.

However, scheduling a 2D simulcast of a 3D broadcast will not always be possible. We have been looking for solutions to allow viewers with a existing HD receiver and a 2D television to watch the 3D content in 2D. It is possible to generate a 2D view from the frame compatible 3D content, by showing the 2D viewers a stretched version of either the left or right eye view.

With the current broadcasting standards this 2D view results in a loss of resolution, to something less than HD resolution but higher than standard definition.

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We're starting a new format for our weeknotes this week to make them a bit easier to read. We'll feature one project in detail each time and just give a quick summary of our other projects. This week the project in focus is The Programme List.

The forthcoming release of The Programme List has a simplified interface based on GEL

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Sometimes we need 'cheering up', 'calming down' or 'a bit of excitement'. Whether we notice it or not, we use affective (i.e. mood-based) language pervasively in life. Yet when we browse for media, we find content categorised into rigid, traditional genres, with searching restricted to factual metadata such as title or director. There is little allowance for relative scales or subjectivity.

The Multimedia Classification project in Archives Research is attempting to address this by answering the question of how we can use mood as a meaningful navigation tool. It certainly isn’t a feckless pursuit: if the BBC archive is ever to be made available to the public, we’re going to need some help finding what we want. From hundreds of thousands of hours of programmes spanning over 75 years, simply searching for ‘comedy’ isn’t going to get you very far! In fact, in our recent study, the majority of people said they would find it useful to be able to search by mood. I understand if you’re sceptical, we’re so used to conventional searching, it’s hard to imagine a useful alternative. However we’re not suggesting this approach will replace conventional methods, more that it will augment and improve them. It may even turn out that searching by mood is something people didn’t realise they wanted it, but once it’s there they’ll wonder how they ever managed without it!

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After a well-deserved Christmas break, we are ready for another great year! We continue making good progress on current projects as well as looking at exciting new opportunities.

The Programme List project is proceeding towards the final spike of the current development with Andrew and Theo giving it a visual makeover to use the BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) using the rack-less Ruby gem, which makes LESS CSS easy to integrate into a ruby application. Duncan has reworked the whole thing from a web app to a website and has been plotting graphs with the usage data to understand strengths and weaknesses.

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Online services frequently gather data from users – users explicitly disclose some of it, and other data is implicitly captured; but different services have differing amounts of access and openness on the data they hold. Users are not always given the opportunity to view the collected data or manage how it will be used. With emerging technologies, more user data will be gathered, often with the intention to enhance the user experience; but gathering user data opens up issues of privacy and security to the detriment of the user experience it was intended to enhance. This literature review aims to explore issues around personal data from the perspective of users, and is part of our work on the FI Content collaborative project.

Security and privacy considerations for end users are complex and ever changing

Privacy and security are complex concepts, they change constantly depending on the context the user is in. Security and privacy cannot be looked at in isolation, people cannot consider them out of context, rather decisions are made as part of another task with a different purpose - for example keeping up to date with friends, or buying some groceries. Users approach each situation depending on past experience and current expectations. There is a recognised paradox between what users say they are comfortable disclosing and what they actually disclose – this is partly because some studies asked security questions out of context or without a purpose for users to relate to; another explanation is that users can be enticed into decisions based on the potential benefits rather than the costs associated with the disclosure. Even when users are less comfortable disclosing information, if the benefits are compelling enough they sometimes find hacks and workarounds to maintain some sense of their privacy while using the system. 

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The European Conference for Visual Media Production (CVMP 2011) held at the BFI at London's south bank aims to bridge cutting edge research with best practice in media production. This year marked the 8th edition of the event, chaired by the author of this post.

A number of keynotes and invited talks were setting the industrial scene, with Google's Jeremy Doig talking about challenges of delivering video in the internet age. Nicola Hoyle from Double Negative gave some insides into the special effects on the movie 'Inception' together with tips how to get from University into post-production industry. Roberto Cipola, Professor at Cambridge University and Director at Toshiba Research Europe gave an overview of vision-based 3D modelling techniques. Sylvain Paris, Researcher at Adobe Systems demonstrated latest research work on automatic stylisation of home-made photos.

The mainly industrial invited talks were complemented by oral and poster sessions with reviewed paper submissions mostly coming from academia. This year's best paper prize sponsored by BBC R&D went to Neill D.F. Campbell (University of Cambridge) For his paper entitled Automatic Object Segmentation from Calibrated Images

What attendees seem to like most is the compact programme and the fact that 'you get the same high calibers as at SIGGRAPH, but you can actually talk to them'. We hope to keep this familiarity and close contact for all attendees as CVMP grows and looks for a bigger venue for next year.