Multimedia Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces

Book excerpt: Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable interactions which are natural, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events; investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing; provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE; presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval; examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation; discusses the features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated with CE products for improved user experience. This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find this a useful reference.