Towards an integrated personalized interactive video environment

One of the most interesting topics in modern multimedia research, as well as one of the most important tasks in modern audiovisual content providing systems is the treatment of content and users at a semantic level. In this framework, mapping user profiles to multimedia content is a challenging and important problem, as the new generation of home television viewers is currently being confronted with a series of technological developments and improvements, targeted towards their expectations from TV broadcasts. This paper presents initial results from our ongoing work in the field of semantic multimedia analysis, retrieval and user profile extraction in the framework of an interactive video environment, within the MELISA project (E. Papaioannou et al., 2004); this project aims at the cross-media broadcasting of sports events featuring interactive advertising and sports-related games over digital television and provides services for personalized presentation of interactive time video content. Initially, it extends on previous work on low level multimedia content, like scene and shot detection, contour extraction and object tracking, descriptor extraction and matching, and semantic document analysis, in the direction of extraction of semantic user preferences. Such preferences can then be utilized towards the personalization of the overall retrieval process and the multimedia content offering to the end-users. To tackle the latter issue, we propose a methodology based mainly on the utilization of a novel mechanism of weights definition, which are combined with the automatically extracted profiling information.