PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"Content Analysis of Videos for Multimedia Authoring of Lectures"

By Mr. Feng Wang


Abstract:

Recorded lectures or presentations are now widely used in universities and
companies. Video content, including texts, speech, human gestures, poses,
interactions between presenters and their audiences, are the main concerns
of users.  However, due to the low resolution, video compression and
environment limitations, most of the content is difficult to detect,
recognize and process, which limits the automatic video analysis and
production.

In this proposal, we first present our work on video content analysis and
how to employ it in an off-line lecture video editing system. The system
is built for general classrooms. Live lectures are automatically captured
by using two static cameras. Topic events, gestures and head poses are
detected, analyzed and employed for video production.

Based on the cues from topic events, gestures and poses, the {\em focus}
of the lecturer is estimated. Topic events are detected and each topic is
synchronized with the corresponding slide by video text analysis. Text
analysis includes text detection, binarization and recognition. A new
approach to reconstruct high-resolution text image is proposed. We show
that the algorithm can significantly improve the text recognition results
compared with the low-resolution video text. We propose effective
approaches to detect, track, segment and recognize the gestures and poses
in the videos.

A finite state machine (FSM) which incorporates gestures and poses,
regions of focus, and general editing rules, is proposed for video
editing. The FSM is designed to generate appropriate camera motion and
cutting effects that suit the pace of a presenter's gestures, poses and
positions. To remedy the undesirable visual effects due to poor lighting
conditions, we also propose approaches to automatically enhance the
visibility and readability of slides and whiteboard images in the edited
videos.


Date:     		Thursday, 16 December 2004

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 1402
			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Prof. Ting-Chuen Pong (Supervisor)
			Dr. Chong-Wah Ngo (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Chiew-Lan Tai (Chairperson)
			Dr. Albert Chung
			Dr. Long Quan


**** ALL are Welcome ****