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CALL FOR JOURNAL PAPERS

Content Analysis and Indexing for Distributed
Multimedia Search & Retrieval in Broadcasting

Multimedia Tools and Applications (Special Issue)
http://www.springer.com/journal/11042

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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
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Manuscript Due: July 1st, 2012
First Round of Reviews: October 1st, 2012

Editors
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Alberto Messina, RAI – Centre for Research and Technological Innovation, Italy; a.messina@rai.it
Andrea Basso, AT&T Labs - Research, USA; basso@research.att.com
Werner Bailer, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, DIGITAL – Institute for Information and Communication Technologies,
Austria; werner.bailer@joanneum.at