MTAP 2012 - MTAP Special Issue on Content Analysis and Indexing for Distributed Multimedia Search & Retrieval in Broadcasting

The transition to digital broadcasting and the concomitant raise of new media channels has meant
a significant increase in communication potential for media publishers, which can now leverage
the advantages of online digital technologies to increase the value and attractiveness of their
services, thus gaining renewed value from content.
A side effect of such abundance of content is that consumers are overwhelmed with “information
overload”. In fact, while digital and Internet services are in principle more appealing due to
opportunity they offer to increase the number of thematic channels, the richness of distributed
content and the possibility for the users to interact, on the other side share and contribute as well
as the accessibility of such content still remain mostly unresolved problems.
On the media production side, professionals often experience dual problems in content selection
and organisation for cross-media and interactive productions. The organization of content into
searchable units through the use of flexible and scalable indexing techniques is seen as one
solution to these problems. In addition, it is of paramount importance to develop the ability to
generate, represent and distribute such informational units (e.g., indexes) in a way that is
consumable and manageable by a wide range of end user terminals, and seamlessly integrated
with web services and mobile apps. The implementation of this scenario would give birth to a
new paradigm which would radically overcome the traditional notion of multimedia indexing,
search and retrieval based on bidirectional interactions between users and index servers, paving
the way to an ecosystem in which users of content can at the same time have the role of indexers
and publishers, and where the universe of accessible objects is dynamically changing to meet
usage trends.
We therefore encourage the submission of works addressing single or several components of a
system for the scenario described above. Submissions should discuss one of the following topics,
with a particular emphasis on illustrating the context of the work in such a scenario.
Distributed multimedia feature extraction, clustering and classification
Distributed architectures for multimedia search
Topic and concept detection, categorization, multimedia genre / format characterisation
Natural query interfaces (e.g., based on speech or gesture input)
Content segmentation and summarization
Low complexity algorithms for acoustic, visual, and multimodal indexing
Multimodal personality identification (i.e. leveraging multiple sources of information)
Visual and acoustic event detection in multimedia
Crowd-assisted news production and material selection
Context based retrieval and indexing of news content
Efficient indexing of live multimedia streams
Automated trust estimation, crowd opinion mining
Analysis of social network activity about multimedia
Multimedia ontologies and tagging
HCI for efficient annotation and retrieval
Automated cross-media and cross-device linking (incl. multiple screens and control devices)
User studies, requirements & trends, standardization
Advanced user experience with multimedia
Tentative schedule
Manuscript Due:
First Round of Reviews: October 1st, 2012
Editors
Alberto Messina, RAI ? Centre for Research and Technological Innovation, Italy; a.messina-AT-rai.it
Andrea Basso, AT&T Labs ? Research, USA; basso-AT-research.att.com
Werner Bailer, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, DIGITAL ? Institute for Information and Communication Technologies, Austria; werner.bailer-AT-joanneum.at