Surveillance is an important task for guaranteeing the security of individuals. Being able to intelligently monitor the activity in given spaces is essential to achieve such surveillance. Sentient spaces based on a large set of sensors provide the potential for such intelligent monitoring. However, heavily instrumenting a space with sensors it is not enough to build a sentient space. One needs a software architecture that allows programming all these sensors in a transparent and efficient manner. In this paper, we present SATware, a stream acquisition and transformation middleware we are developing to analyze, query, and transform multimodal sensor data streams to facilitate flexible development of sentient environments. SATware provides a powerful application development environment in which users (i.e., application builders) can focus on the specifics of the application without having to deal with the technical peculiarities of accessing a large number of diverse sensors via different protocols.

Photos are often a means to remember personal events, and the creation of photo albums is the attempt to preserve our memories in a nice book. For a long time people have been creating such photo albums on the basis of prints from analog photos arranged in an album book with scissors and glue and annotated with comments and captions - a tedious task which in these days is getting support by authoring tools and digitally mastered photo books. Relying on the content of others such as printed travel guides, news papers, leaflets, but also friends and family the personal content often has been enriched, enhanced, and completed. This is the starting point of our work: with digital photography and the increasing amount of content-based and contextual metadata of personal photos we can now use this metadata to actually support the targeted and semi-automatic inclusion of interesting, related information from content of others, e.g., from Web 2.0 communities, and offer and add it at the right spot in the personal album. In this paper, we show how photo album creation can benefit from leveraging information learned from many users in regard of the album's content, structure, and semantics.

We demonstrate the concept of event-centric multimedia data management in the context of a multimedia eChronicle for the analysis, exploration, and reporting of events in military reconnaissance missions. Unlike the traditional media-centric approach, event-centricmultimedia data management focuses on the management of real-world events; documenting media are regarded as event metadata. For the detection of mission events, we apply simple but robust spatio-temporal clustering of basic soldier state and media events with good results considering the uncontrolled environment a military patrol constitutes. The core of the architecture is generic and applicable for the event-centric management of multimedia data in other domains as well.

The nature of information has changed significantly in the last two decades. Now information is multimedia, sensitive to its spatio-temporal roots, live, and dynamic. Current database and search technology is very limited in addressing organization, management, and access of emerging information systems. In this paper, we address some of the fundamental issues that must be addressed in general multimedia information management systems. We present multimedia electronic chronicles (e-chronicles) as an example of emerging systems that need such technology. We believe that to deal with dynamic information, events should be used as the fundamental basis in organizing and accessing information. Event models used in our approach capture the semantics involved in supporting e-chronicles. Our ideas are demonstrated in the context of an e-chronicle that is being implemented for a reconnaissance application using multiple disparate sensors.

Abstract Current XML database systems largely neglect or make limited use of available schema definitions. But only with schema definitions at hand is it possible to ensure database consistency by document validation, to store, index, and access the content of elements and attribute values in an appropriately typed manner and not just as text, and to perform more sophisticated query optimizations. In this paper, we give an overview of our implementation of a schema‐aware XML database system: the Persistent Typed Document Object Model (PTDOM). Originally developed for the management of MPEG‐7 media descriptions in a database, the core of PTDOM is made up of a schema catalog capable of managing schema definitions written in MPEG‐7 DDL, a superset of XML schema. PTDOM exploits the schema information maintained by this catalog in a variety of contexts: for document validation, for typed storage of elements and attribute values, for structural indexing of XML documents providing additional efficient access paths to document contents, and for optimized construction of query execution plans for XPath expressions. This along with its profound extensibility with new datatypes, user‐defined functions, and value index structures makes PTDOM a flexible and effective database solution not only for the management of MPEG‐7 media descriptions but also for the management of any kind of XML documents for which schema definitions exist. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Video management research has largely been ignoring the increased attractiveness of using camera-equipped mobile phones for the production of short home video clips, mostly considering them as additional channels for video consumption. The CANDELA project, which is part of the European ITEA program, focuses on the integration of video content analysis with advanced retrieval, mobile, networked delivery, and distributed storage technologies. In this paper, we present the CANDELA personal mobile multimedia management platform, which implements an end-to-end system for personal video production, retrieval, and consumption utilizing mobile devices and distributed databases.

This paper presents MobiCon, a video production tool for mobile camera phones. MobiCon integrates video clip capture with context-aware, personalized clip annotation -- supporting automatic annotation suggestions based on context data and efficient manual annotation with user-specific ontologies and keywords -- and clip sharing secured by digital rights management techniques. Thus, MobiCon allows users to inexpensively create metadata-annotated video clips for a better management of their clip collections and keeps them in control of the clips they share.

Current multimedia database systems largely focus on specific media types and/or application domains. This paper gives a sketch of METIS, a database solution for the unified management of any kind of digital media, characterized by profound customizability for domain or application needs. The system core is based on an expressive data model that can be adapted to any scheme for media management, description, and classification desired, and can accommodate arbitrary query operators, similarity measures, and/or feature extraction algorithms. METIS is based on a persistence abstraction layer allowing the exchange of storage back-ends and includes a customizable web front-end for media management. Thereby, METIS establishes a common database foundation for a wide spectrum of multimedia applications.