ACM Multimedia 2012 seeks contributions in the following 11 areas:
- Media Content Analysis and Processing
- Multimedia Activity and Event Understanding
- Multimedia Search and Retrieval
- Mobile and Location-Based Media
- Social Media
- Multimedia Systems and Middleware
- Media Transport and Sharing
- Multimedia Security and Forensics
- Multimedia Authoring, Production and Consumption
- Multimedia Interaction and Applications
- Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture
1. Content Analysis and Processing
This area targets novel multimedia (image/video, audio, text or other sensors) solutions for content understanding and processing. The topics of interest include but are not restricted to:
- multimedia feature extraction,
- semantic concept detection,
- image/video retrieval,
- object recognition/detection/segmentation,
- music/audio analysis,
- cross-media analysis,
- 3D content analysis,
- cross-camera content analysis,
- machine learning for content analysis,
- and also scalable processing and scalability issues in multimedia content analysis.
2. Multimedia Activity and Event Understanding
Activities and events provide a natural abstraction of what is happening in the real world. They can be captured by various forms of multimedia data such as videos and images but also in textual descriptions (including tags, microblogs, etc.) and sensory data. For the new area on Multimedia Activity and Event Understanding we invite original research papers on various aspects of understanding activities and events in multimedia such as:
- low-level activity and event detection from multimedia content,
- semantic event representations,
- event processing and aggregation,
- logical event representation,
- reasoning and recounting,
- as well as solid contributions and evaluations of event-based applications.
All submissions should clearly explain their relation to activities and events in multimedia.
3. Multimedia Search and Retrieval
Multimedia search and retrieval actively looks for novel solutions, theoretical foundations, and better representations to address accuracy, efficiency, and scalability problems in multimedia search area, as well as a variety of multimedia applications based on search technologies such as multimedia search engines, personal media data management, and copyright infringement detection. In this area, we are soliciting papers in the following topics:
- large-scale indexing,
- novel representation for efficient retrieval,
- multi-modality search,
- multimedia search for social media data,
- copy detection,
- near-duplicate retrieval,
- query intent analysis,
- relevance feedback,
- ranking and re-ranking,
- search by example (including drawing),
- search based content understanding from massive multimedia data,
- instance-based object matching and recognition,
- and creative user interfaces for multimedia search and retrieval.
4. Mobile and Location-Based Media
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous and playing increasingly vital roles in people’s daily life. For example, people are using their phones as a personal concierge to discover what is around and decide what to do. Today’s mobile users not only expect fast Internet connection wherever they go and timely interaction with each other via social network on the move, but also seek effective, efficient, and frequent location-based user experience when searching and managing media contents through mobile devices. Today’s smart mobile devices have been equipped with more powerful CPUs and GPUs, multiple sensors, high-resolution displays, and fast Internet access. The capability for acquiring, processing, transmitting, and presenting media on the devices has been significantly enhanced. All of the above have opened new ways for creative and novel forms of interaction with the physical world and cyberspace through mobile devices. The topics of interest in Mobile and Location-Based Media area include, but are not limited to:
- mobile and location-based multimedia search, sharing, indexing, and retrieval;
- mobile and location-based personalization, navigation, and recommendation systems;
- mobile context-aware systems;
- mobile interactive media editing, authoring, visualization, and browsing;
- mobile interfaces for communication and social networking;
- mobile content delivery and streaming; mobile augmented reality;
- mobile tracking; media geo-tagging;
- mobile and location-based computational photography;
- mobile and location-based multimedia security and forensics;
- field and ethnographic studies on mobile and location technologies;
- and mobile applications (including e-Health, assistive technologies, biometrics, entertainment, apps discovery, and gaming).
5. Social Media
Social networking applications have transformed the Web into an interactive sharing platform where users upload data and media, comment on and share this content within their social circles. All this information is implicitly or explicitly interconnected based on various properties such as tags, favorites and social links between users, groups and communities. The availability of such mass amount of new interconnected media creates numerous opportunities and research challenges and as well as many exciting applications. Social media offers a unique opportunity to structure and extract information and to benefit multiple areas ranging, for example, from computer vision to sociology and marketing.
This area seeks novel contributions on various aspects of social media research. The related topics include theory, methodology and algorithms for social media content creation, modeling, manipulation, content analysis, information extraction, storage, search, learning and mining. We particularly welcome novel papers that tightly combine social media and multimedia, which address the interconnected, heterogeneous media data on social media. Examples include but are not restricted to exploring multimedia technologies for social networking sites or leveraging social networks to tackle open research challenges in multimedia community.
6. Multimedia Systems and Middleware
This area targets applications, mechanisms, algorithms, tools, etc. that enable the design and developments of efficient, robust, and scalable multimedia systems. In general, it includes solutions at various levels in the software and hardware stack. In particular, the area covers topics like efficient implementations of and processing frameworks for multimedia workloads running on both traditional hardware and co-processors like graphics processing units (GPUs), network processors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
We are also interested in submissions that explore the design of architectures and software for mobile multimedia and multimedia in pervasive computing applications. This also includes tools and middleware to build multimedia applications, like content adaptation and transcoding, stream processing, tools for large-scale clusters, etc.
Finally, this area covers multimedia systems providing a mixed-reality user experience, and to evaluate user experiences, we seek solutions for and case studies of Quality of Experience (QoE) research in the area of multimedia systems.
7. Media Transport and Sharing
Papers in this area will broadly focus on networking, operating systems and storage aspects of media transmission. Topics of interest include distribution and sharing of stored or live media, like traditional television, 3D video, panoramic video, networked games, tele-presence, and multimodal sensor networks. Typical techniques for media transport and sharing include overlay and peer-to-peer networks, streaming protocols, scalable media streaming, and media streaming using emerging technologies such as next generation cellular and wireless networks. Novel experimental or theoretical research that develops and analyzes network protocols and their performance with a particular focus on media are encouraged.
8. Multimedia Security and Forensics
With the advent of social networks and cloud computing, multimedia has become an integral part of society, but is also vulnerable to malicious use. To prevent illegal use, techniques are needed to ensure the security of multimedia in terms of its source identity, content integrity, privacy, trust, and anonymity. To detect and analyze illegal use, tools are needed to support the processing, interpretation, retrieval, and visualization of multimedia data in the different steps of the investigation process. This area is seeking novel contributions in the area of multimedia security, covering digital watermarking for content and source authentication, secure multimedia communications and interactions, multimedia privacy and trust, multimedia forensics, large-scale near-copy detection, image and video retrieval for intelligence and surveillance, information linking, and visual analytics.
9. Multimedia Authoring, Production and Consumption
Multimedia content production is continuing its evolution from all-purpose professional tools/systems to focused solutions for domain-specific end-user applications. The increased use of media objects in broader contexts such as social media applications requires new approaches to making media accessible, persistent, reusable and multi-targeted. In the area of media authoring, we invite contributions describing research results for manual, semi-automatic and automatic integration of synchronized media objects in broader systems. The Media Authoring area addresses all stages of media authoring: content selection, composition, augmenting, publishing, archiving, distributing and sharing. It also considers transformation of multimedia content to digital and physical media and different output representations and devices. We are interested in receiving submissions that describe general-purpose tools as well as results tailored to specific user groups and application domains.
10. Multimedia Interaction and Applications
Multimedia Interaction and Applications seeks contributions that address the way humans whether individuals, groups, or masses, interact naturally with or through multimedia systems. The primary goal of our track is to report on cutting edge research addressing the challenges associated with designing, developing, and deploying human-centered multimedia paradigms, technologies, applications, and their evaluations. We are in particular interested in multimedia and multimodal systems and technologies that pertain to fields such as life logging, social interaction around multimedia content, education and training, healthcare at institutions as well as at the home, support for special aid groups, sustainable ambience, collaborative work- or leisure environments. We seek for system descriptions or user studies and evaluations of multimedia and multimodal systems. All papers in this area are expected to include a strong human-centered evaluation where at all appropriate.
11. Multimedia Arts, Entertainment and Digital Culture
We solicit papers describing the innovative use of digital technology in the creation, analysis or critique of multimedia art, entertainment applications, cultural artifacts, environments, and creative processes. The successful submission should demonstrate conceptual clarity, computational rigor, and suggest new research and experience opportunities for the field of multimedia at large. We seek a broad range of integrated artistic and scientific statements describing digital systems for art, entertainment or cultural engagement including, but not limited to:
- dynamic, generative and interactive multimedia artworks;
- digital entertainment technologies;
- tools for content preservation;
- cultural heritage case studies;
- hybrid physical/digital installations;
- and mobile, situated and online environments.
We encourage authors to critically examine the artistic, technological and/or cultural implications and impact of their work, revealing challenges and opportunities of rich arts, entertainment or cultural significance.
