Context: The newest standard in video coding High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) should have an appropriate coder to fully use its potential. There are a lot of video quality assessment methods. These methods are necessary to establish the quality of the video. Objectives: This thesis is a comparison of video quality assessment methods. Objective is to find out which objective method is the most similar to the subjective method. Videos used in tests are encoded in the H.265/HEVC standard. Methods: For testing MSE, PSNR, SSIM methods there is special software created in MATLAB. For VQM method downloaded software was used for testing. Results and conclusions: For videos watched on mobile device: PSNR is the most similar to subjective metric. However for videos watched on television screen: VQM is the most similar to subjective metric. Keywords: Video Quality Assessment, Video Quality Prediction, Video Compression, Video Quality Metrics

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M.A. (Information Studies) / This study deals with the problem of subject cataloging of video material as an example of a moving image material. The use of video material as a source of information has increased tremendously over the past few decades. The information contained in video material must however be accessible and to obtain this objective adequate subject cataloging must be done ...

Imitation is a core deficit often observed in children diagnosed with autism. Video modeling has been shown to be effective for teaching children with autism a variety of skills, but there is little research demonstrating the effectiveness of this technique with core skills such as imitation. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a video modeling intervention to teach a preschool-age child with autism to imitate novel and acquired actions (with and without objects) in natural contexts (i.e., songs and toy play activities). A general case approach was used to examine the instructional universe of common preschool songs in order to select the exemplars that were most likely to facilitate generalization. In addition to video modeling, additive components that included highlighting the critical features of the video examples and prompting/fading were required to demonstrate a functional relationship. Experimental control was evident in a multiple baseline design across three imitation activities. The results are discussed with reference to previous research, future research directions, and implications for practice in educational settings. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

With the emergence of peer-to-peer video-on-demand systems, new avenues for keeping track of and subsequently meeting user needs and desires have arisen. Based on the idea of contextual priming, we introduce a new frame-work, SUE, that takes advantage of the intimate level of user profiling afforded by the internet as well as the linear and segmented nature of p2p technology to determine a user's exact on-screen experience at any given time interval. This allows us to more accurately determine the type of information a user is likely to be more receptive to. Our design differs from other existing systems in two ways: (a) the level of granularity it can support, accommodating factors from both the user's on-screen and physical environment in making its recommendations and (b) in addressing some of the shortcomings seen in current applications, such as those imposed by coarse user profiling and faulty associations. In order to examine the viability of our framework, we provide a high level design specifying its incorporation into an existing p2p video system, the BitVampire project. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

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Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is of great importance for interpersonal communication, since it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by a few haptic telecommunication softwares, this thesis presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to replace the haptic device, which is used in HugMe system as human hand, to further increase people's degree of immersion with the audio-video-haptic teleconferencing system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This thesis also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Also, additional applications with the touchscreen, such as writing and drawing, are developed and tested. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.

This thesis support paper is the trajectory of my search to uncover what constitutes an aesthetic for my current practice and to unpack what I think the work is about. In this paper I trace the development of my process, identify primary aesthetic preferences, elucidate inspirations, and finally present several interpretations of the work. I came into the MFA program with the intention of moving my practice in animation to an art form that was non-linear and free of a flat projection screen and story arc. Working with materials is important to me and I also wanted to find a way to integrate time-based media with material art forms. What I discovered early in the MFA program is that making this shift in my practice involved understanding how object art generates meaning differently than the animated film does. In the Thesis Exhibition I take ordinary household objects, disrupt them so they are unfamiliar then project animated video of other ordinary objects made strange onto them. The illogical objects and their juxtaposition generates a tension – a cognitive stretching – that gives rise to various readings of the work. Perceptually engaged, I am immersed in a cognitive puzzle trying to make sense of the paradoxes I am experiencing and bring them to a resolution. It continues to astound me to what degree the household objects that I make strange can generate sensation, feeling, and meaning through the amalgam of their motion, gesture, and form, through the way in which they are situated in space and the way in which they relate to one another.

Recent advancement in cameras and image processing technology has generated a paradigm shift from traditional 2D and 3D video to Multi-view Video (MVV) technology, while at the same time improving video quality and compression through standards such as High Efficiency video Coding (HEVC). In multi-view, cameras are placed in predetermined positions to capture the video from various views. Delivering such views with high quality over the Internet is a challenging prospect, as MVV traffic is several times larger than traditional video since it consists of multiple video sequences each captured from a different angle, requiring more bandwidth than single view video to transmit MVV. Also, the Internet is known to be prone to packet loss, delay, and bandwidth variation, which adversely affects MVV transmission. Another challenge is that end users’ devices have different capabilities in terms of computing power, display, and access link capacity, requiring MVV to be adapted to each user’s context. In this paper, we propose an HEVC Multi-View system using Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) to overcome the above mentioned challenges. Our system uses an adaptive mechanism to adjust the video bitrate to the variations of bandwidth in best effort networks. We also propose a novel scalable way for the Multi-view video and Depth (MVD) content for 3D video in terms of the number of transmitted views. Our objective measurements show that our method of transmitting MVV content can maximize the perceptual quality of virtual views after the rendering and hence increase the user’s quality of experience.

This study focuses on the conceptualization of video evidence as constructed by judges in their written decisions in Canadian criminal courts and the impact this conceptualization has on understandings of truth. Recent years have seen substantial developments in video recording technology and in the cultural practices that support its use. Of particular interest to this study is the mobilization of video as a means of legitimizing truth claims. Using a qualitative content analysis of 52 recent (2005-2015) Canadian criminal court decisions, this study seeks to understand the way in which judges discuss video evidence in their decisions and the impact these discussions have on discourses of truth. The results of this analysis illustrate that the features typically associated with video evidence coincide closely with specific and longstanding discourses of objectivity, reliability, and credibility that are used to evaluate competing claims in criminal courts—discourses that have traditionally been developed with reference to evaluating testimony. Judges’ adoption of these particular criteria over any others results in video achieving an eminent position in the hierarchy of evidence before the courts. The way in which judges conceptualize video evidence both reflects the historic discourses that shape the current judicial approach to video evidence and (re)creates discourses that will be relied on in future. Given the influential role of courts as official arbiters of truth, the discourses adopted by judges have important implications both within and beyond the legal system.