In the context of Audio Visual Question Answering (AVQA) tasks, the audio and visual modalities could be learnt on three levels: 1) Spatial, 2) Temporal, and 3) Semantic. Existing AVQA methods suffer from two major shortcomings; the audio-visual (AV) information passing through the network isn’t aligned on Spatial and Temporal levels; and, inter-modal (audio and visual) Semantic information is often not balanced within a context; this results in poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Contextual Multi-modal Alignment (CAD) network that addresses the challenges in AVQA methods by i) introducing a parameter-free stochastic Contextual block that ensures robust audio and visual alignment on the Spatial level; ii) proposing a pre-training technique for dynamic audio and visual alignment on Temporal level in a self-supervised setting, and iii) introducing a cross-attention mechanism to balance audio and visual information on Semantic level. The proposed novel CAD network improves the overall performance over the state-of-the-art methods on average by 9.4% on the MUSIC-AVQA dataset. We also demonstrate that our proposed contributions to AVQA can be added to the existing methods to improve their performance without additional complexity requirements.

This paper presents the results from two studies which used a dual-task methodology to measure an audience's experience of immersion while watching video under typical television viewing conditions. Immersion was measured while participants watched either a high dynamic range, wide color gamut video or a standard dynamic range, standard color gamut video, in high definition or ultra-high definition. Other video parameters were carefully measured and controlled. The study found that high dynamic range, wide color gamut video is significantly more immersive than standard dynamic range, standard color gamut video in the chosen configuration. However, there was no evidence of significant differences in immersion between high-definition and ultra-high-definition resolutions.

Merging computer-generated content with real-world visual data is one of the main challenges in fields like augmented reality or visual effects and is increasingly important in broadcasting, gaming, medical, automotive, maintenance, and learning applications. Although augmented reality (AR) has been investigated for a long time, it has recently emerged as a hot topic, with significant commercial interest. One reason for that is the availability of new camera-equipped devices like smart phones or tablets that enable see-through capabilities. Combined with powerful graphics capabilities, sensors, and tracking methods, AR now becomes available to everyone. In addition, glasses-based systems, like Microsoft’s HoloLens, allow for hands-free visualization, enabling many new applications.

This ACM International Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences is in its 3rd edition. Since 2013 in Barcelona, it has been a meeting point of researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the area of immersive media environments, applications and experiences. After the successful first edition at ACM Multimedia 2013 and the consolidation of the theme and the team at Orlando in 2014, ImmersiveMe'15 aims at bringing to the stage new ideas and developments that keep this topic as appealing as in the previous editions. ImmersiveMe'15 will now take place in Brisbane and, again, it will be a platform to present interesting and out-of-the-box new work that contributes to make the world more interactive, immersive and engaging.

The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences (ImmersiveMe'14) at ACM Multimedia aims at bringing together researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the emergent area of immersive media experiences, through the exploration of different scenarios, applications, and neighboring fields. This second edition, after a successful first edition at ACM Multimedia 2013, provides a platform for presenting on-going work, to consolidate and tie different research communities working on this engaging area, as well as to point directions for the future.

Immersive media has the potential for strong impact on users' emotions and their sense of presence and engagement. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers, students, media producers, service providers and industry players in the area of emergent immersive media. The workshop will provide a platform for a deep discussion on ongoing work, recent achievements and experiences. It is expected not only to consolidate experiences but also to identify aspects where strong collaboration among all the interested players is needed and to point towards future working directions.

In this paper we describe the development of an augmented reality system designed to provide an exciting new way for the Natural History Museum in London to present evolutionary history to their visitors. The system uses a through-the-lens tracker and infrared LED markers to provide an unobtrusive and robust system that can operate for multiple users across a wide area.

The first thing and obvious comment to make about this book is that I found the title, Pragmatic Software Testing, to be misleading. Being pragmatic is about making decisions and taking actions that are useful in practice, and not just in theory. The title page also contains the phrases ‘Timely, Practical & Reliable’ and ‘Becoming an Efficient & Effective Test Professional’. In some ways these are actually contradictions to a pragmatic approach. As the author describes in the forward the book has been developed, with encouragement from colleagues and friends, from the author's previously self-published work on Efficient and Effective Software Testing. The author then goes on to define Pragmatic Software Testing as ‘…involves being effective and efficient when testing software’. So why is the title and definition important? Well if you buy this book expecting to read pragmatic solutions to common testing problems, which is a large part of the day-to-day role of many testers and test managers, then you will not find them. It also takes time and concerted effort to establish and develop an efficient and effective testing process, which is not addressed by this book. And these processes are sometimes (or often) implemented in a way that is not well suited to pragmatic change. Sometimes pragmatic decisions may actually lead to inefficient and ineffective testing. The book takes a firmly structured view of the testing world. There is mention of other approaches, such as iterative and agile. These are covered in just calls Reactive Testing is discussed in only 11 pages, over a page in the strategy chapter. What the author with fully two pages of caveats. Out of 366 pages this is hardly a ringing endorsement, and will be a disappointment to those who would look to the book for wider coverage of the testing world, and limits its appeal to the classic structured approach. The book describes a number of test case design techniques, with training exercises, but I did not find them easy to work through. The diagrams have a style that is busy and difficult to read. Another criticism of the examples is that it isn't clear as to how some of the lengthy tables are populated. It is worth noting that there are other and better techniques books available. I have read the author's previous work Managing the Testing Process, and found that although an easy read, it was set at an introductory level. This book has more depth, is more rounded, and the benefit is that the reader will take more away from this work. It is common in book reviews of this type to say that this book might be suitable for beginners as a reference work covering many techniques. In fact the book does offer advice to what it calls ‘beginning testers’. And there are doubtless many who would benefit from reading this book and sharing the author's experience. I am though left thinking that there is still a need for a book that covers Pragmatic Software Testing.

A new studio system for the production of three-dimensional (3-D) content is introduced. The system combines the ability to capture dynamic scenes, based on a multicamera system in a chroma-key environment, with a view-dependent projection for actor feedback. The system allows the generation and rendering of 3-D models in preview quality for on-set visualization in real time and in high quality for postproduction applications in an offline phase. The shape reconstruction is based on the computation of the visual hull. The view-dependent projection component allows actors to be immersed into a virtual scene and to interact with virtual components. The functional modules of the system were implemented in a highly distributed system using standard, inexpensive IT components. Therefore, the system is quite scalable and can be fitted into most studio environments. For the integration of the system components, a middleware architecture was developed.

No abstract available.

Twin-lens telecine flicker is considered as a special type of artefact in film-to-video conversions. It is introduced by telecine equipment using separate optic light paths to register each of the two fields of a line-interlaced video frame. Motion estimation and compensation algorithms suitable for the elimination of this type of artefact are developed. Their application achieves considerable improvement in picture quality both subjectively and in terms of measured mean-square error.