<p>The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape aims at developing a fully automated translation system between English and South African Sign Language (SASL). Three important aspects of this system require SASL documentation and knowledge. These are: recognition of SASL from a video sequence, linguistic translation between SASL and English and the rendering of SASL. Unfortunately, SASL documentation is a scarce resource and no official or complete documentation exists. This research focuses on creating an online collaborative video annotation knowledge management system for SASL where various members of the community can upload SASL videos to and annotate them in any of the sign language notation systems, SignWriting, HamNoSys and/or Stokoe. As such, knowledge about SASL structure is pooled into a central and freely accessible knowledge base that can be used as required. The usability and performance of the system were evaluated. The usability of the system was graded by users on a rating scale from one to five for a specific set of tasks. The system was found to have an overall usability of 3.1, slightly better than average. The performance evaluation included load and stress tests which measured the system response time for a number of users for a specific set of tasks. It was found that the system is stable and can scale up to cater for an increasing user base by improving the underlying hardware.</p>

Behavioural research studies often include a data acquisition process, during which subjects are observed, and the displayed behaviours recorded, and a subsequent analysis process, during which the observed behaviours are analysed. In addition the data acquisition process could occur in real-time, or at a later stage, by referring to a recording of the original session. This dissertation addresses the latter approach through the use of computer based digital video technology. A windows based video analysis system, called VAS, that was developed to assist with the acquisition of observed behaviours from the video, and the analysis thereof is discussed. This is followed by a discussion of the implementation of VAS. Finally the directions for further research are identified, and discussed. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996.

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This thesis focuses on video watermarking robust against geometric attacks and video compressions. In addition to the requirements for an image watermarking algorithm, a digital video watermarking algorithm has to be robust against advanced video compressions, frame loss, frame swapping, aspect ratio change, frame rate change, intra- and inter-frame filtering, etc. Video compression, especially, the most efficient compression standard, H.264, and geometric attacks, such as rotation and cropping, frame aspect ratio change, and translation, are considered the most challenging attacks for video watermarking algorithms. In this thesis, we first review typical watermarking algorithms robust against geometric attacks and video compressions, and point out their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we propose our robust video watermarking algorithms against Rotation, Scaling and Translation (RST) attacks and MPEG-2 compression based on the logpolar mapping and the phase-only filtering method. Rotation or scaling transformation in the spatial domain results in vertical or horizontal shift in the log-polar mapping (LPM) of the magnitude of the Fourier spectrum of the target frame. Translation has no effect in this domain. This method is very robust to RST attacks and MPEG-2 compression. We also demonstrate that this method can be used as a RST parameters detector to work with other watermarking algorithms to improve their robustness to RST attacks. Furthermore, we propose a new video watermarking algorithm based on the 1D DFT (one-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform) and 1D projection. This algorithm enhances the robustness to video compression and is able to resist the most advanced video compression, H.264. The 1D DFT for a video sequence along the temporal domain generates an ideal domain, in which the spatial information is still kept and the temporal information is obtained. With detailed analysis and calculation, we choose the frames with highest temporal frequencies to embed the fence-shaped watermark pattern in the Radon transform domain of the selected frames. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by video compression standards MPEG-2 and H.264; geometric attacks such as rotation, translation, and aspect-ratio changes; and other video processing. The most important advantages of this video watermarking algorithm are its simplicity, practicality and robustness.

Information quality corresponds to the degree of excellence in communicating knowledge or intelligence and encompasses aspects of validity, accuracy, reliability, bias, transparency, and comprehensiveness among others. Professional news, public relations, and user generated content alike all have their own subtly different information quality concerns. With so much recent growth in online video, it is also apparent that more and more consumers will be getting their information from online videos and that understanding the information quality of video becomes paramount for a consumer wanting to make decisions based on it. This dissertation explores the design and evaluation of collaborative video annotation and presentation interfaces as motivated by the desire for better information quality in online video. We designed, built, and evaluated three systems: (1) Audio Puzzler, a puzzle game which as a by-product of play produces highly accurate time-stamped transcripts of video, (2) Videolyzer, a video annotation system designed to aid bloggers and journalists collect, aggregate, and share analyses of information quality of video, and (3) Videolyzer CE, a simplified video annotation presentation which syndicates the knowledge collected using Videolyzer to a wider range of users in order to modulate their perceptions of video information. We contribute to knowledge of different interface methods for collaborative video annotation and to mechanisms for enhancing accuracy of objective metadata such as transcripts as well as subjective notions of information quality of the video itself.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-201).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-32).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-92). Also available on the Internet.