Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of various approaches to training equestrian skills. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to compare an instructional video(s), in combination with verbal instruction, to verbal instruction alone on the percentage of horseback riding and safety errors made among beginner trail riders. An analysis of the overall percentage of steps completed independently revealed significant differences between instructional conditions that favored the use of video. Experiment 2 involved more experienced riders and more sophisticated equitation skills. Specifically, it examined whether a training package would decrease the percentage of jumping equitation errors among riders training in the sport of eventing. Using a multiple baseline across participants design, a training package was evaluated which entailed written feedback and video footage of the lesson from the trainer's point of view in addition to standard instruction. The findings of this study are inconclusive. The overall performance of riders through a six jump course was highly variable from week to week, regardless of the type of instruction utilized during lessons. Although several jumping equitation skills were never problematic for riders, no other skills routinely improved. Limitations and future studies are discussed.

viii, 87 p. : ill. (some col.) / This thesis examines the history of distribution platforms for artists' video. Artists' video is defined as time based art works that employ the medium of film, videotape, digital video, or any combination thereof. The thesis categorizes different points of access for artists' video from the 1960s to the present as well as how artists have distributed their work. Three macro level platforms serve to classify the different sites of access between artists' video and a viewer - the first is television, the second is institution, and the third is the Internet. Over the past forty years, artists' video has transitioned from a marginal practice that existed outside of the institution to a medium that is now synonymous with the idea of a contemporary art museum. However, the Internet as a platform allows artists' video to exist outside of the museum, which is consistent with the earliest goals associated with this medium. / Committee in charge: Kate Mondloch: Chair and Advisor; Albert Narath: Member; John Fenn: Member

A evolução das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC) favoreceu o crescimento do uso de variados meios na comunicação. Entre diversos meios, o vídeo em particular, necessita de uma grande banda para ser transmitido, ou de um grande espaço para ser armazenado. Uma análise dos diversos sinais de uma comunicação multimídia mostra, entretanto, que existe uma grande redundância de informação. Utilizando técnicas de compressão é possível reduzir de uma a duas ordens de grandeza a quantidade de informação veiculada, mantendo uma qualidade satisfatória. Uma das formas de compressão busca a relação de similaridade entre os quadros vizinhos de uma cena, identificando a redundância temporal existente entre as imagens. Essa técnica chama-se estimação de movimento, este processo é muito eficaz, mas o custo computacional é elevado, exigindo a implementação de algoritmos eficientes em hardware, para o caso de compressão em tempo real de vídeos de alta resolução. Esta dissertação apresenta uma investigação sobre algoritmos de estimação de movimento visando implementações em hardware. Todos os algoritmos foram desenvolvidos primeiramente em linguagem C e submetidos a diversos testes para avaliação de desempenho e custo computacional. Os algoritmos foram aplicados a diversas amostras de vídeo utilizadas pela comunidade científica, para avaliação em aplicações reais. As avaliações demonstraram que os algoritmos rápidos conseguem realizar o processo de estimação de movimento de maneira eficiente, obtendo bons resultados em termos de qualidade de vetores, esforço computacional e desempenho. Com as análises dos resultados obtidos, o algoritmo Busca Diamante (Diamond Search) foi escolhido para ser implementado em hardware, com dois níveis diferentes de subamostragem de pixel: 2:1 e 4:1. As arquiteturas para o algoritmo Busca Diamante, com sub-amostragem de pixel de 2:1 e 4:1, foram descritas em VHDL, sintetizadas para FPGAs Virtex-4 da Xilinx e também para standard cells na tecnologia TSMC 0,18μm. Os resultados mostram que as arquiteturas desenvolvidas possuem desempenho superior ao necessário para tratar vídeos HDTV 1080p em tempo real a 30 quadros por segundo. As arquiteturas desenvolvidas também apresentam um baixo consumo de recursos de hardware, após a síntese para FPGA e ASIC. / The evolution of the communication and information technologies push the development of several communication media. These media, video in particular, need a large bandwidth to be transmitted, or a large digital storage capacity. Many multimedia signals show, however, a high information redundancy. By using compression techniques it is possible to reduce the amount of coded information by one or two orders of magnitude, keeping a satisfactory visual quality. One of these compression techniques searches the similarity between neighboring frames of a scene, identifying the temporal redundancy between them. This technique is called motion estimation, and it is a very efficient method for compression. However, the computational complexity of the motion estimation requires high performance algorithms in hardware, when used for real time compression of high resolution videos. This dissertation presents a comprehensive investigation about motion estimation algorithms, targeting a hardware implementation. All the investigated algorithms were first developed in C language and submitted to many evaluation tests. The algorithms were applied to ten video samples used by the scientific community for the evaluation of real application. The evaluation showed that fast algorithms can carry out the motion estimation process efficiently, producing good results in vectors quality, computational effort and performance. With the results analyses, the Diamond Search algorithm was chosen to be hardware designed, with two different levels of pixel subsampling, 2:1 and 4:1. The architectures for Diamond Search algorithm, with pixel subsampling of 2:1 and 4:1, were described in VHDL, synthesized to Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs and also to standard cells TSMC 0.18μm technology. The developed architectures have sufficient performance to process HDTV 1080p videos at 30 frames per second and demand small hardware resources consumption after synthesis to FPGA and ASIC. Keywords: Video compression, motion estimation, VLSI design.

La segmentation de personnes dans les images et les vidéos est une problématique actuellement au coeur de nombreux travaux. Nous nous intéressons à la segmentation de personnes debout. Pour cela, nous avons mis au point deux méthodes originales : La première est une continuation d'une méthode de détection efficace. On réalise une pré-segmentation en associant aux segments de contour de l'image une valeur de vraisemblance en tant qu'élément d'une silhouette humaine par une combinaison d'histogrammes de gradients orientés (HOG) et de machines à vecteurs de support (SVM) prises à l'échelle des ces segments. Une recherche d'arbre optimal dans un graphe intégrant les données de la pré-segmentation permet de reconstruire la silhouette de la personne. Enfin, une utilisation itérative de ce processus permet d'en améliorer la performance. La seconde méthode prend en compte l'interaction de l'utilisateur pour une image. Une coupe de graphe est guidée par un gabarit non binaire représentant une silhouette humaine. Nous proposons également un gabarit par parties pour s'adapter à la posture de la personne. Nous avons enfin transposé cette méthode à la segmentation de vidéos et la réalisation automatique de trimaps. / Human segmentation in images and videos is currently a difficult task. We are interested in the upright people class. We have realized two original methods. After a review of the state of the art, this thesis presents these two methods. The first one is the continuation of an effective segmentation method. The union of Histogramms of Oriented Gradients based descriptors (HOG) and of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier at the contour segment scale provides a likelihood degree of being part of a human silhouette. The shortest path in a graph created from this data provides the segmentation. The second method is interactive. A graph cut is guided by a non-binary template of silhouette that represents the probability of each pixel to be a part of the person. In a second time, a part-based template is computed to be adapted to the person posture. This method can be transformed to segment videos or automaticaly produce trimaps.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-08-16Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:59:36Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 schiavon_mk_me_rcla.pdf: 295710 bytes, checksum: 944c25e1bc76493c6a7a42b86a71810f (MD5) / Nas últimas duas décadas do século XX e nesse início de século XXI temos visto um crescimento acentuado de crianças que se utilizam da nova tecnologia dos videogames para se divertirem, quer seja com amigos, familiares ou mesmo sozinhas. Quando surgiram, os videogames eram jogados pelos jovens e adultos, mas esta tendência modificou-se e agora os videogames começaram a ser jogados pelas crianças. Os estados emocionais são pouco estudados na relação entre criança e videogame. As emoções são imprescindíveis nas tomadas de decisões, das mais simples as mais complexas. Elas são fundamentais também para a sociabilidade, além de organizar a forma como os dados e os acontecimentos são armazenados na memória. O objetivo deste estudo foi compreender as influências do videogame Wii® na vida da criança, de modo a identificar, descrever e analisar os motivos e as emoções declaradas por crianças usuárias de jogos virtuais do tipo Wii®, tentando ainda compreender a relação estabelecida entre o real e o virtual, pela criança, diante dos tais jogos virtuais. Para tanto, a metodologia utilizada foi embasada na pesquisa qualitativa onde coletamos os dados através da observação sistemática de crianças jogando Wii®, fornecendo o registro naquilo que chamamos de caderno de campo e o segundo instrumento de coleta de dados presente em nosso trabalho foi a entrevista. Esta técnica diz respeito à prestação de informações ou opiniões sobre determinada temática, feita de forma oral, pelo entrevistado. Foi possível constatar que, os sujeitos desta pesquisa não reconhecem aspectos relacionados com a vida real nos jogos de Wii®. Concluímos que as razões mais evidentes para as crianças jogarem Wii® são: a diversão e o prazer; a sensação de serem capazes de alcançar objetivos e, deste modo, sentirem... / In the last two decades of the 20th century and early 21st century have seen a dramatic growth of children who use the new technology of video games to enjoy themselves, whether with family, friends or even alone. When surfaced, the video games were played by young people and adults, but this trend has changed and now video games began to be played by children. Emotional States are little studied in the relationship between child and videogame. Emotions are indispensable in decision-making, from the most simple to the most complex. They are also fundamental to sociability, in addition to organizing the way data and events are stored in memory. The objective of this study was to understand the influences of videogame Wii® in the child's life, to identify, describing, and analyzing the reasons and declared emotions by child users of virtual Games Wii® type, still trying to understand the relationship established between the real and the virtual, by the child, in the face of such virtual games. For this purpose, the methodology used was based on qualitative research where we collect data through systematic observation of children playing Wii®, providing the record what we call field notebook and the second data collection instrument present in our work was the interview. This technique relates to the provision of information or opinions on a particular subject, made orally, for the respondent. It was possible to see that the subject of this survey do not recognize aspects related to real life Games Wii®. We conclude that the most obvious reasons for children playing Wii® are fun and pleasure, the feeling of being able to reach goals and thus feel that are good things; the possibility of interaction with the other factor that allows... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

A evolução das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC) favoreceu o crescimento do uso de variados meios na comunicação. Entre diversos meios, o vídeo em particular, necessita de uma grande banda para ser transmitido, ou de um grande espaço para ser armazenado. Uma análise dos diversos sinais de uma comunicação multimídia mostra, entretanto, que existe uma grande redundância de informação. Utilizando técnicas de compressão é possível reduzir de uma a duas ordens de grandeza a quantidade de informação veiculada, mantendo uma qualidade satisfatória. Uma das formas de compressão busca a relação de similaridade entre os quadros vizinhos de uma cena, identificando a redundância temporal existente entre as imagens. Essa técnica chama-se estimação de movimento, este processo é muito eficaz, mas o custo computacional é elevado, exigindo a implementação de algoritmos eficientes em hardware, para o caso de compressão em tempo real de vídeos de alta resolução. Esta dissertação apresenta uma investigação sobre algoritmos de estimação de movimento visando implementações em hardware. Todos os algoritmos foram desenvolvidos primeiramente em linguagem C e submetidos a diversos testes para avaliação de desempenho e custo computacional. Os algoritmos foram aplicados a diversas amostras de vídeo utilizadas pela comunidade científica, para avaliação em aplicações reais. As avaliações demonstraram que os algoritmos rápidos conseguem realizar o processo de estimação de movimento de maneira eficiente, obtendo bons resultados em termos de qualidade de vetores, esforço computacional e desempenho. Com as análises dos resultados obtidos, o algoritmo Busca Diamante (Diamond Search) foi escolhido para ser implementado em hardware, com dois níveis diferentes de subamostragem de pixel: 2:1 e 4:1. As arquiteturas para o algoritmo Busca Diamante, com sub-amostragem de pixel de 2:1 e 4:1, foram descritas em VHDL, sintetizadas para FPGAs Virtex-4 da Xilinx e também para standard cells na tecnologia TSMC 0,18μm. Os resultados mostram que as arquiteturas desenvolvidas possuem desempenho superior ao necessário para tratar vídeos HDTV 1080p em tempo real a 30 quadros por segundo. As arquiteturas desenvolvidas também apresentam um baixo consumo de recursos de hardware, após a síntese para FPGA e ASIC. / The evolution of the communication and information technologies push the development of several communication media. These media, video in particular, need a large bandwidth to be transmitted, or a large digital storage capacity. Many multimedia signals show, however, a high information redundancy. By using compression techniques it is possible to reduce the amount of coded information by one or two orders of magnitude, keeping a satisfactory visual quality. One of these compression techniques searches the similarity between neighboring frames of a scene, identifying the temporal redundancy between them. This technique is called motion estimation, and it is a very efficient method for compression. However, the computational complexity of the motion estimation requires high performance algorithms in hardware, when used for real time compression of high resolution videos. This dissertation presents a comprehensive investigation about motion estimation algorithms, targeting a hardware implementation. All the investigated algorithms were first developed in C language and submitted to many evaluation tests. The algorithms were applied to ten video samples used by the scientific community for the evaluation of real application. The evaluation showed that fast algorithms can carry out the motion estimation process efficiently, producing good results in vectors quality, computational effort and performance. With the results analyses, the Diamond Search algorithm was chosen to be hardware designed, with two different levels of pixel subsampling, 2:1 and 4:1. The architectures for Diamond Search algorithm, with pixel subsampling of 2:1 and 4:1, were described in VHDL, synthesized to Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs and also to standard cells TSMC 0.18μm technology. The developed architectures have sufficient performance to process HDTV 1080p videos at 30 frames per second and demand small hardware resources consumption after synthesis to FPGA and ASIC. Keywords: Video compression, motion estimation, VLSI design.

The purpose of this project was the specification, design and implementation of a prototype 2-D MPEG-4 authoring tool. A literature study was conducted of the MPEG-4 standard and multimedia authoring tools to determine the specification and design of a prototype 2- D MPEG-4 authoring tool. The specification and design was used as a basis for the implementation of a prototype 2-D MPEG-4 authoring tool that complies with the Complete 2-D Scene Graph Profile. The need for research into MPEG-4 authoring tools arose from the reported lack of knowledge of the MPEG-4 standard and the limited implementations of MPEG-4 authoring tools available to content authors. In order for MPEG-4 to reach its full potential, it will require authoring tools and content players that satisfy the needs of its users. The theoretical component of this dissertation included a literature study of the MPEG-4 standard and an investigation of relevant multimedia authoring systems. MPEG-4 was introduced as a standard that allows for the creation and streaming of interactive multimedia content at variable bit rates over high and low bandwidth connections. The requirements for the prototype 2-D MPEG-4 authoring system were documented and a prototype system satisfying the requirements was designed, implemented and evaluated. The evaluation of the prototype system showed that the system successfully satisfied all its requirements and that it provides the user with an easy to use and intuitive authoring tool. MPEG-4 has the potential to satisfy the increasing demand for innovative multimedia content on low bandwidth networks, including the Internet and mobile networks, as well as the need expressed by users to interact with multimedia content. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the understanding of the MPEG-4 standard, its functionality and the design of a 2-D MPEG-4 Authoring tool. Keywords: MPEG-4; MPEG-4 authoring; Binary Format for Scenes.

Memoria (diseñador gráfico) / Hoy en día, es difícil para un grupo rock emergente surgir dentro del mercado de la música nacional, debido a que las influencias extranjeras dominan la industria, y al tener más recursos, pueden llegar de una manera mucho más eficaz a su público objetivo. Además, el mercado nacional de la música es mayormente cerrado y exclusivo, lo que dificulta mucho el reconocimiento de éstas bandas por los medios tradicionales de información, radio, tv y periódicos, lo que conlleva que los grupos centren su difusión y promoción principalmente por internet a través de las redes sociales y por las tocatas o conciertos en vivo. En la constante e incansable lucha contra la piratería y el surgimiento de diversos streaming de reproducción online, los grupos musicales emergentes no centran sus ingresos en la propia venta de su música, lo que los lleva a la necesidad de la creación de una estética visual, ya sea en los afiches y difusión web o en las propuestas escenográficas de sus tocatas, para el posterior reconocimiento y surgimiento dentro del mercado de la música. Dentro de éste marco, Aytona, un grupo de rock-pop originario de Santiago, planea insertarse dentro de la nueva música nacional, sin embargo en la actualidad, carecen de una identidad visual que los identifique y represente. La necesidad de ésta investigación surge en la creación de un plan de comunicación visual y escenográfica para Aytona que se base en el concepto central de la banda -la idea de estética de video juego de 8-bit-, y que en el desarrollo de la memoria de Título se represente en la reconstrucción de su página web, difusión de material online y, en cuanto a la escenografía, a través del VJing -composiciones visuales en vivo- como una nueva perspectiva en las tocatas en vivo de la música rock.

Les nouvelles techniques de compression vidéo doivent intégrer un haut niveau d'adaptabilité, à la fois en terme de bande passante réseau, de scalabilité des formats (taille d'images, espace de couleur…) et de compatibilité avec l'existant. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse regroupe des études menées en lien avec le standard HEVC. Dans une première partie, plusieurs adaptations qui exploitent les propriétés du signal et qui sont mises en place lors de la création du bit-stream sont explorées. L'étude d'un nouveau partitionnement des images pour mieux s'ajuster aux frontières réelles du mouvement permet des gains significatifs. Ce principe est étendu à la modélisation long-terme du mouvement à l'aide de trajectoires. Nous montrons que l'on peut aussi exploiter la corrélation inter-composantes des images et compenser les variations de luminance inter-images pour augmenter l'efficacité de la compression. Dans une seconde partie, des adaptations réalisées sur des flux vidéo compressés existants et qui s'appuient sur des propriétés de flexibilité intrinsèque de certains bit-streams sont investiguées. En particulier, un nouveau type de codage scalable qui supporte des espaces de couleur différents est proposé. De ces travaux, nous dérivons des metadata et un modèle associé pour opérer un remapping couleur générique des images. Le stream-switching est aussi exploré comme une application particulière du codage scalable. Plusieurs de ces techniques ont été proposées à MPEG. Certaines ont été adoptées dans le standard HEVC et aussi dans la nouvelle norme UHD Blu-ray Disc. Nous avons investigué des méthodes variées pour adapter le codage de la vidéo aux différentes conditions de distribution et aux spécificités de certains contenus. Suivant les scénarios, on peut sélectionner et combiner plusieurs d'entre elles pour répondre au mieux aux besoins des applications. / The new video codecs should be designed with an high level of adaptability in terms of network bandwidth, format scalability (size, color space…) and backward compatibility. This thesis was made in this context and within the scope of the HEVC standard development. In a first part, several Video Coding adaptations that exploit the signal properties and which take place at the bit-stream creation are explored. The study of improved frame partitioning for inter prediction allows better fitting the actual motion frontiers and shows significant gains. This principle is further extended to long-term motion modeling with trajectories. We also show how the cross-component correlation statistics and the luminance change between pictures can be exploited to increase the coding efficiency. In a second part, post-creation stream adaptations relying on intrinsic stream flexibility are investigated. In particular, a new color gamut scalability scheme addressing color space adaptation is proposed. From this work, we derive color remapping metadata and an associated model to provide low complexity and general purpose color remapping feature. We also explore the adaptive resolution coding and how to extend scalable codec to stream-switching applications. Several of the described techniques have been proposed to MPEG. Some of them have been adopted in the HEVC standard and in the UHD Blu-ray Disc. Various techniques for adapting the video compression to the content characteristics and to the distribution use cases have been considered. They can be selected or combined together depending on the applications requirements.

One aim of this thesis is to provide an overview of technological, economic and legal aspects of the distribution of audiovisual content over internet and other IP networks. This thesis will provide introduction to most widely used compression methods of digital audio and video, transmission methods and protocols. Another aim is to create a case study that deals with selecting the best solution for a commercial project of Video On Demand server. This objective is achieved by applying methods of multi-criteria evaluation of options based on theoretical analysis of distribution solutions. The secondary aim is to determine the total cost of ownership of the different options by using the methodology of TCO (Total Cost of ownership). This thesis also provides a comparison with the solution based on purely non-commercial focus.