The third Workshop on Automated Information Extraction in Media Production (AIEMPro10) aims at fostering exchange of ideas and of practices between leading experts in research and leading actors in the media community, in order to catalyze the migration towards new ways of producing media content, aided by large scale introduction of tools for automated multimedia analysis and understanding. Furthermore, the workshop helps researchers in better understanding what are some real-life key requirements which would enable their scientific developments come into wider adoption.

In video coding, certain limitations imposed by the environment, most typically the bit rate, need to be fulfilled. This is achieved by allowing the encoder to reduce the quality in one or several ways, such as the distortion, the resolution and the frame rate. The upcoming scalable video coding mechanisms allow this reduction to take place not exclusively during the encoding step, but at any time. This allows us to reduce the quality in a more personalized way, taking into consideration the preferences of the end user. This paper presents a framework that enables such user dependent quality reductions. We validated this framework by means of a test involving 19 test persons. The results of this mechanism are good, but up to now not sufficiently reliable to use it in commercial applications. At the same time, we still see some room for improvement

H.264/AVC is a video codec developed by the Joint Video Team (JVT); a cooperation between the ITU-T VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group) and ISO/IEC MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). This new video coding standard has some new features that allow to get significant improvements in coding efficiency. This improved coding efficiency leads to an overall more complex algorithm which has high demands regarding memory usage and processing power. Complexity, however, is an abstract concept and cannot be measured in a simple manner. In this paper we present a method to obtain an accurate and more in-depth view on the internals of the JVT/AVC decoder. By decoding several bit streams having different encoding parameters, various program characteristics were measured. On these measurements, principal components analysis was performed to get a different view on these measurements. Our results show that the various encoding parameters have a clear impact on the low level behavior of the decoder. Moreover, our methodology allows us to give an explanation for the observed dissimilarities.

The increasing diversity of the characteristics of the terminals and networks that are used to access multimedia content through the internet introduces new challenges for the distribution of multimedia data. Scalable video coding will be one of the elementary solutions in this domain. This type of coding allows to adapt an encoded video sequence to the limitations of the network or the receiving device by means of very basic operations. Algorithms for creating fully scalable video streams, in which multiple types of scalability are offered at the same time, are becoming mature. On the other hand, research on applications that use such bitstreams is only recently emerging. In this paper, we introduce a mathematical model for describing such bitstreams. In addition, we show how we can model applications that use scalable bitstreams by means of definitions that are built on top of this model. In particular, we chose to describe a multicast protocol that is targeted at scalable bitstreams. This way, we will demonstrate that it is possible to define an abstract model for scalable bitstreams, that can be used as a tool for reasoning about such bitstreams and related applications.