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As WWW technology becomes popular today, one of the main issues on serving WWW is how to create WWW content and what kind of contents we should put on WWW. Our research and development division of the Center for Information and Multimedia Studies (CIMS) in Kyoto university works on this issue for several years and have been developing new methods that can make multimedia contents from real world automatically.
We mainly take up the scenes that are related with human activities and can be commonly seen in universities. For example, we have daily classes and student activities anywhere in campus in our university.
To let people view such activities on internet, various kinds of presentation techniques have to be used. Video and audio media are typical and essential media among them because we usually understand the human activities by our eyes and ears.
Our research group studies visual medium first, and then plans to utilize audio medium for generating new type of WWW contents.
Because video medium is usually obtained by video cameras, we consider two types of camera environment for taking videos of human activities.
Concerning the second type, a good point is wide application because it is easy to set each camera in a certain scene. On applying this environment, it is important how to extract attractive visual information and how to show it in video style because cameras are set in the scenes where events will happen but no one knows when they arise. In other words, a method that is applied in this type of camera environment should cut out interesting subsequences in a long sequence of video.
Hence we describe two issues of our research in this paper which are related with the two types of camera environment shown above. The two issues are :
Currently, the first issue aims to support distance learning in universities. As classrooms are generally too large to shoot by only one video camera and there many persons to shoot, we have to prepare several cameras and control them according to a situation in the classroom. We will mention our approach in Section 2.
The second issue is to support browsing video which is taken by one video camera for long period at a place people go in and out. This is a new approach of using cameras that are connected to LAN. As it is one of the hardest works to review the video for long time, we have developed video skimming method that makes video length shorter. Details are described in Section 3.