Evolution of Video Streaming (I)

       Sixty years ago, families in USA used to watch television programs in 14” CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screens. Today, an Indian teenager waiting for a bus in a bus stop uses his 5” smartphone and access video through Internet. Digitized colour video signals are streamed to an individual. Earlier analogue B&W (Black and White) Television (TV) signals were broadcasted to all the viewers. In the span of six decades lot of changes have occurred. The video resolution has increased; use of digitized video signals (colour) became the norm; wide use of LED and LCD screens; wide range of screens (4” to 80”).  In the video distribution front, Internet is competing with traditional TV broadcasting stations. The way viewers consume the video content has changed too. The shift is from ‘fixed-time and family-centred’ to ‘any-time and individual-centred.’ Half a century ago if any one prophesied that “One day people will have telephone at their hands and using that telephone they will watch TV,”  he/she would be branded as lunatic. Today we use smart-phone to talk, run few apps (applications) as well as to watch videos from YouTube.

Earlier TV sets were connected to roof top Yagi-Uda antenna using flat ribbon cable. Unlike FM antenna (i.e. dipole antenna) Yagi-Uda antenna is a directional antenna. So, it has to be positioned towards the direction of TV signal broadcasting station. Channel changing has to be carried out by changing the position of the knob in the TV. Wired or wireless remote control was not available. Receiving two TV channels is a luxury. 

The necessity of Blog's existence - An introspection (II)

In the last post (The Blog's existence - An introspection) dealt with the genesis of this blog. It discussed the twin fold objectives of the blog. It likes to be a provider of meta-resource rather than resource itself and to be a provider of frameworks or viewpoints to comprehend Digital Image Processing concepts. It explains the concept of 'digest.' It explores the suitable digital platform to provide the digest-like content.

This post does a cost-benefit analysis of writing an articles in a blog. As expected it ends with stating benefits of writing outweigh the cost of writing.

Series of operations has to be completed to upload a post in the blog. The operations are follows:

• Choosing a topic
• Collecting topic related materials from Internet
• Read the materials and comprehend
• Build a framework to write an article
• Preparation of a draft based on the framework and then refining it again and again
• Check the size of article (max 1000 words), grammatical errors and choosing a picture (less than 50 KB)
• Upload the content in the blog

The Blog's existence -An introspection (I)

Emotion and rational thinking are two sides of a same coin. If I had thought rationally I am sure I would not commenced blogging activity. Running a blog for three years with frequent posts is a small feat. Over the years euphoria of owning a blog vanes and I am pestered for 'deliverable' by my own rational mind. I am in a dilemma whether to have leisure life or pursue passion or work hard for career advancement. This post will unravel my mind and factors that pull (to continue the blog) and push (to windup) me will be elaborated. Hope you enjoy!

Genesis

Blog is concatenation of two words Web and log (weB-LOG). Log is another term for diary. Blog functions as an online diary. Unlike typical diary most of the blogs are thrown open to public for reading and allows viewers to post their comments. In the inception, this blog functioned as an online storehouse of favoured Web links.  Each Web link accompanied a small note for easy reference. Next, articles were written on search keyword (ex. gigapixel camera, SIFT) and Web resources appended in the end of the article. As days progressed number of articles present in the blog increased. Articles exhibited a pattern in style and content. The pattern became a guideline for upcoming posts. Objectives of blog formulated over a period of time.

A thinking man in a moving train          (Image Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Video Indexing and Retrieval

Advancement in digitalization, video technology and communication networks made Internet as a huge repository for text, audio and video documents. In the years to come searching video content in Internet and playing it on a mobile is going to be the norm. Implementation of video search engine poses big challenge because of two reasons. First, size of the video is very big and the next reason is structure of video is not as explicit as text. A text document can be easily broken down i.e. parsed into paragraphs, lines, and words. Much of the video search engine concepts have evolved from text search engine. 

Video Analytics – I

    Today every nook and corner of public place is under surveillance camera. They work round the clock and for 365 days. Thus huge amount of video data is generated. Monitoring a video for more than 20 minutes is tedious to human beings and security officers mostly fail to detect abnormal activities. Thus there is a requirement for “machine assistance” to security officers. Watching video via Internet has become a norm. Popular video servers like YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe provide video free of charge. Netflix is subscription based video server. Sixty hours of video are uploaded every minute in YouTube video servers alone [1]. Thus one can imagine the quantum of video content available in Internet. In the years to come more than half of Internet traffic will be due to video. We encounter problem choosing 'right' or cherry-pick the video from the huge pile of video scattered in Internet. Here to we require some form of “machine assistance” to ordinary viewer.

Video is made up of consecutive sequences of frames or images. Each image contain large amount of pixel information. Images offer very little prior structure to work with [2]. Earlier video databases were small and manual annotation was a possible solution. Today it is not a feasible solution. Present day computing power will manage huge size of data. But automatic analysis of video requires artificial intelligence. Video analytics is the baby step in that direction. Video analytics deals with extraction of information from video with the aid of machine assistance. Video processing means performing some image processing (like resampling or colour correction) on the video content. Most of the time extracted information is overlaid on the video for better human interpretation. Big data analytics is latest buzz word in technical world. Video analytics is considered as a subset of big data analytics.