We propose a new Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) system which provides broadcast, batch and interactive services concurrently. An analytical model is derived for the performance evaluation of this MoD system. Numerical results show that with proper design the system can provide better system performance than some previously proposed MoD systems.

Interactive audio-video applications over IP networks have subjective tradeoffs between fidelity and latency owing to packet buffering at the receiver. Increasing the buffering time improves the fidelity, whereas it degrades the latency. This paper makes the subjective tradeoff between fidelity and latency clear in a quantitative way. In addition, we examine the effect of tasks on the subjective tradeoff. In evaluating the effect of tasks, we use two tasks according to ITU-T Recommendation P.920. An experiment was conducted to measure user-level QoS of an interactive application with the psychometric methods. We then investigate the subjective tradeoff quantitatively by QoS mapping. The experimental results confirm that there exists the buffering time which makes user-level QoS the highest. The results also show that the optimum buffering time depends on the kind of task.

Intelligent scissors is an interactive image segmentation algorithm which allows a user to select piece-wise globally optimal contour segment corresponding to a desired object boundary. However, the intelligent scissors is too sensitive to a noise and texture patterns in an image since it utilizes the gradient information concerning the pixel intensities. This paper describes a new intelligent scissors based on the concept of the separability in order to improve the object boundary extraction performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed by some experiments for actual images acquired by an ordinary digital camera.

Network emulation system constructs a virtual network environment which has the characteristics of controllable and repeatable network conditions. This makes it possible to predict the correctness and performance of proposed new technology before deploying to Internet. In this paper we present a methodology for evaluating the correctness and performance of applications based on the PARNEM, a parallel discrete event network emulator. PARNEM employs a BSP based real-time event scheduling engine, provides flexible interactive mechanism and facilitates legacy network models reuse. PARNEM allows detailed and accurate study of application behavior. Comprehensive case studies covering bottleneck bandwidth measurement and distributed cooperative web caching system demonstrate that network emulation technology opens a wide range of new opportunities for examining the behavior of applications.

The notion of correlation intractable function ensembles (CIFEs) was introduced in an attempt to capture the "unpredictability" property of random oracles [12]: If O is a random oracle then it is infeasible to find an input x such that the input-output pair (x,O(x)) has some desired property. In this paper, we observe relationships between zero-knowledge protocols and CIFEs. Specifically, we show that, in the non-uniform model, the existence of CIFEs implies that 3-round auxiliary-input zero-knowledge (AIZK) AM interactive proofs exist only for BPP languages. In the uniform model, we show that 3-round AIZK AM interactive proofs with perfect completeness exist only for easy-to-approximate languages. These conditional triviality results extend to constant-round AIZK AM interactive proofs assuming the existence of multi-input CIFEs, where "multi-input" means that the correlation intractability is satisfied with respect to multiple input-output pairs. Also, as a corollary, we show that any construction of uniform multi-input CIFEs from uniform one-way functions proves unconditionally that constant-round AIZK AM interactive proofs with perfect completeness only for easy-to-approximate languages.

For hybrid Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) systems which support broadcast, batch and interactive services, the charging scheme employed plays an important role in the delivery of good service quality to users, while also determining the revenue generated for the service provider. In this letter a new charging scheme is proposed. This scheme provides the same quality of service to the users as previous charging schemes while providing higher revenue. Numerical results are presented to evaluate the performance of the new charging scheme in comparison with previous schemes.

One of the challenging issues in affective computing is to give a machine the ability to recognize the affective states with intensity of a person. Few studies are directed toward this goal by categorizing affective behavior of the person into a set of discrete categories. But still two problems exist: gesture is not yet a concern as a channel of affective communication in interactive technology, and existing systems only model discrete categories but not affective dimensions, e.g., intensity. Modeling the intensity of emotion has been well addressed in synthetic autonomous agent and virtual environment literature, but there is an evident lack of attention in other important research areas such as affective computing, machine vision, and robotic. In this work, we propose an affective gesture recognition system that can recognize the emotion of a child and the intensity of the emotion states in a scenario of game playing. We used levels of cognitive and non-cognitive appraisal factors to estimate intensity of emotion. System has an intelligent agent (called Mix) that takes these factors into consideration and adapt the game state to create a more positive interactive environment for the child.

An effective human-robot interaction is essential for wide penetration of service robots into the market. Such robot needs a vision system to recognize objects. It is, however, difficult to realize vision systems that can work in various conditions. More robust techniques of object recognition and image segmentation are essential. Thus, we have proposed to use the human user's assistance for objects recognition through speech. This paper presents a system that recognizes objects in occlusion and/or multicolor cases using geometric and photometric analysis of images. Based on the analysis results, the system makes a hypothesis of the scene. Then, it asks the user for confirmation by describing the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is not correct, the system generates another hypothesis until it correctly understands the scene. Through experiments on a real mobile robot, we have confirmed the usefulness of the system.

In this paper, we propose an interactive instruction system named IMPRESSION, which allows performance of interactive presentations using multimedia educational materials in class. In recent years, although many practices of educational methodology with information technology and presentation tools using multimedia resources as educational materials have come into common use, instructors can only present such materials in a slide-sheet form through the use of such presentation tools in class. Therefore, instructors can neither do formative evaluations nor can they present suitable materials according to students' reactions in class. Our proposed methodology employs a scenario-based approach in a double loop instructional design process to overcome such problems. Instructors design an instructional plan as a scenario, and subsequently implement and modify the plan through formative evaluation during the class. They then conduct a summative evaluation based on planned and implemented instructions for redesign. To realize our methodology, in this paper we propose and design an instruction system that provides functions to select and present multimedia materials interactively provided on the Internet during the class; we then record these instructions. After implementing it, we confirmed that we can conduct the class flexibly based on our methodology through its practical use in an actual classroom environment.

A new simply implemented collusion-attack free identity-based non-interactive key sharing scheme (ID-NIKS) has been proposed. A common-key can be shared by executing only once a modular exponentiation which is equivalent to RSA deciphering, and the security depends on the difficulty of factoring and the discrete logarithm problem. Each user's secret information can be generated by solving two simple discrete logarithm problems and synthsizing their solutions by linear combination. The detail comparison with the Maurer-Yacobi's scheme including its modified versions shows that the computational complexity to generate each user's secret information is much smaller and the freedom to select system parameters is much greater than that of the Maurer-Yacobi's scheme. Then our proposed scheme can be implemented very easily and hence it is suitable for practical use.

This paper analyzes the user-perceived QoS (Quality of Service) of interactive data application, the most notable being web browsing, in a shared wireless packet access network. We present elaborate analytical results regarding the mean page delay, the Equivalent Circuit Rate (ECR), and the system saturation point for interactive data users with different channel conditions. The ECR for a user in a shared access network is the channel rate that a dedicated connection would need in order to offer an equivalent user experience. The system saturation point is the maximum number of users that can be served with a given tolerable service delay in a shared packet access system. These analytical results are useful in the performance prediction of a real wireless environment with multiple user groups that are served with different service rates due to multiple channel conditions. Therefore, our analytical results can be used in the network planning, admission control, and service differentiation for different user groups. Our analysis is demonstrated to be in good accord with computer simulations performed on model systems based on EDGE TDMA and IEEE 802.16 OFDMA.

iPat/OMP is an interactive parallelization assistance tool for OpenMP. In the present paper, we describe the design concept of iPat/OMP, the parallelization sequence achieved by the tool and its current implementation status. In addition, we present an evaluation of the performance of the implemented functionalities. The experimental results show that iPat/OMP can detect parallelism and create an appropriate OpenMP directive for several for-loops.

In this paper, we present the Tangible Media Control System (TMCS), which allows users to manipulate media contents through physical objects in an intuitive way. Currently, most people access digital media contents by exploiting GUI. However, it only provides limited manipulation of the contents. The proposed system, instead of a mouse and a keyboard, adopts two types of tangible objects, i.e. a RFID-enabled object and a tracker-embedded object. The TMCS enables users to easily access and control digital media contents through tangible objects. In addition, it supports an interactive media controller which can be used to synthesize media contents according to users' taste. It also offers personalized contents, which suits users' preferences, by exploiting context such as the users' profile and situational information. Accordingly, the TMCS demonstrates that tangible interfaces with context can provide more effective interfaces to satisfy users' demands. Therefore, the proposed system can be applied to various interactive applications such as multimedia education, entertainment, multimedia editor, etc.

In this paper, we demonstrate an immersive and interactive broadcasting production system with a new haptically enhanced multimedia broadcasting chain. The system adapts Augmented Reality (AR) techniques, which merges captured videos and virtual 3D media seamlessly through multimedia streaming technology, and haptic interaction technology in near real-time. In this system, viewers at the haptic multimedia client can interact with AR broadcasting production transmitted via communication network. We demonstrate two test applications, which show that the addition of AR- and haptic-interaction to the conventional audio-visual contents can improve immersiveness and interactivity of viewers with rich contents service.

We are developing a helper robot that carries out tasks ordered by the user through speech. The robot needs a vision system to recognize the objects appearing in the orders. It is, however, difficult to realize vision systems that can work in various conditions. Thus, we have proposed to use the human user's assistance through speech. When the vision system cannot achieve a task, the robot makes a speech to the user so that the natural response by the user can give helpful information for its vision system. Our previous system assumes that it can segment images without failure. However, if there are occluded objects and/or objects composed of multicolor parts, segmentation failures cannot be avoided. This paper presents an extended system that tries to recover from segmentation failures using photometric invariance. If the system is not sure about segmentation results, the system asks the user by appropriate expressions depending on the invariant values. Experimental results show the usefulness of the system.

In this paper, we propose a new multimodal interaction description language, MIML (Multimodal Interaction Markup Language), which defines dialogue patterns between human and various types of interactive agents. The feature of this language is three-layered description of agent-based interactive systems. The high-level description is a task definition that can easily construct typical agent-based interactive task control information. The middle-level description is an interaction description that defines agent's behavior and user's input at the granularity of dialogue segment. The low-level description is a platform dependent description that can override the pre-defined function in the interaction description. The connection between task-level and interaction-level is realized by generation of interaction description templates from the task level description. The connection between interaction-level and platform-level is realized by a binding mechanism of XML. As a result of the comparison with other languages, MIML has advantages in high-level interaction description, modality extensibility and compatibility with standardized technologies.

Interactive multimedia applications (IMAs) require not only adequate bandwidth to support large volume data transmission but also bounded end-to-end transmission delay between end users. This study proposes a Delay and Degree constrained Multicasting Spanning Tree (D2MST) algorithm to build an any-to-any share tree for IMAs. D2MST comprises root selection and spanning tree generation. A weighting function is defined based on the novel concept of network center and gravity to choose the root of a share tree. From the root, a spanning tree is built by incrementally connecting nodes with larger "power" to the tree so that the degree constraint is satisfied. Simulation results show that D2MST can successfully generate a Δ-constraint MST in which a high percentage of nodes can interact within the bounded delay.

Visibility culling techniques have been studied extensively in computer graphics for interactive walkthrough applications in recent years. In this paper, a visibility culling approach by exploiting hardware-accelerated occlusion query is proposed. Organizing the regular grid representation of input scene as an octree-like hierarchy, a 2-tier view frustum culling algorithm is to efficiently cull away nodes invisible from a given viewpoint. Employing the eye-siding number of nodes, we can quickly enumerate an occlusion front-to-back order and effectively maximize the number of parallelizable occlusion queries for nodes while traversing the hierarchy. As experimental results show, our approach improves the overall performance in the test walkthrough.

In this letter, we study a hybrid Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) system which provides broadcast, batch and interactive services. An analytical model for such an MoD system is provided. Numerical results show that with proper design, the system can provide better performance than those systems which only provide any subset of two services.

We consider delivering interactive dramas. A viewer interacts with a contents provider by answering multiple-choice questions and the answers to these questions influence the plot of delivered story. All possible plots can be represented by a directed graph such that every plot corresponds to some path of the graph. A delivery should be controlled according to the directed graph such that each viewer's history of answered choices forms a path of the graph. On the other hand, because some character of a viewer is known to a contents provider from his history of choices, a viewer tries to prevent even a contents provider from linking choices made by him. In this paper, we introduce unlinkable delivery for an interactive drama and propose such a delivery system for interactive dramas that viewer's choices are unlinkable and delivery is controlled according to the directed graph.