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Opportunities and Challenges of Video Content and Video Technology in Smart Factories
Abstract
Production companies typically have not utilized video content and video technology in factory environments to a significant extent in the past. However, the current Industry 4.0 movement inspires companies to reconsider production processes and job qualifications for their shop floor workforce. Infrastructure and machines get connected to central manufacturing execution systems in digitization and datafication efforts. In the realm of this fourth industrial revolution, companies are encouraged to revisit their strategy regarding videobased applications as well. This paper discusses the current situation and selected aspects of opportunities and challenges of video technology that might enable added value in such environments.
... Apart from traditional 2D videos, future research may investigate how the Virtual Director concept can be adapted to other forms of media, such as the particular formats summarised by the term 'extended reality' (AR, VR, MR, see Chambel, Kaiser, Ranasinghe, Van den Broeck, & Niamut, 2021) . Initial steps into that direction have already been addressed within this thesis (Kaiser, 2018a(Kaiser, , 2018b(Kaiser, , 2019a. 3D video communication tools keep improving, as described in Y. Zhang et al. (2021). ...
... Experiments that were originally planned to be conducted in the Vconect project are described in Appendix B. 6. Apart from the application scenarios addressed in this thesis, the potential of Virtual Director technology in further application areas is yet to be investigated, e.g. in manifold learning applications using live video streams, telehealth, or smart factories (cf. Kaiser, 2018aKaiser, , 2019a. ...
For recorded video content, researchers have proposed advanced concepts and approaches that enable the automatic composition and personalised presentation of coherent videos. This is typically achieved by selecting from a repository of individual video clips and concatenating a new sequence of clips based on some kind of model. However, there is a lack of generic concepts dedicatedly enabling such video mixing functionality for scenarios based on live video streams. This thesis aims to address this gap and explores how a live vision mixing process could be automated in the context of live television production, and, consequently, also extended to other application scenarios. This approach is coined the 'Virtual Director' concept. The name of the concept is inspired by the decision making processes which human broadcast TV directors are conducting when vision mixing live video streams stemming from multiple cameras. Understanding what is currently happening in the scene, they decide which camera view to show, at what point in time to switch to a different perspective, and how to adhere to cinematographic and cinematic paradigms while doing so. While the automation of vision mixing is the focus of this thesis, it is not the ultimate goal of the underlying vision. To automate for many viewers in parallel in a scalable manner allows taking decisions for each viewer or groups of viewers individually. To successfully do so allows moving away from a broadcast model where every viewer gets to see the same output. Particular content adaptation and personalisation features may provide added value for users. Preferences can be expressed dynamically, enabling interactive media experiences. In the course of this thesis, Virtual Director research prototypes are developed for three distinct application domains. Firstly, for distributed theatre performance, a script-based approach and a set of software tools are designed. A basic approach for the decision making process and a pattern how to decouple it into two core components are proposed. A trial validates the technology which does not implement full automation, yet successfully enables a theatre play. The second application scenario is live event 'narrowcast', a term used to denote the personalised equivalent to a 'broadcast'. In the context of this scenario, several computational approaches are considered for the implementation of an automatic Virtual Director with the conclusion to use and recommend a combination of (complex) event processing engines and event-condition-action (ECA) rules to model the decision making behaviour. Several content genres are subject to experimentation. Evaluation interviews provide detailed feedback on the specific research prototypes as well as the Virtual Director concept in general. In the third application scenario, group video communication, the most mature decision making behaviour is achieved. This behaviour needs to be defined in what can be a challenging process and is formalised in a model that is referred to as the 'production grammar'. The aforementioned pattern is realised such that a 'Semantic Lifting' process is processing low-level cue information in order to derive in more abstract, higher-level terms what is currently happening in the scene. The output of the Semantic Lifting process is informing and triggering the second process which is called the 'Director' decision making and eventually takes decisions on how to present the available content on screens. Overall, the exploratory research on the Virtual Director concept resulted in its successful application in the three domains, validated by stakeholder feedback and a range of informal and formal evaluation efforts. As a synthesis of the research in the three application scenarios, the thesis includes a detailed description of the Virtual Director concept. This description is contextualised by many detailed learnings that are considered relevant for both scholars and practitioners regarding the development of such technology.
The primary objective of this collection of articles is to demonstrate how European industries and academic partners developed methods and technologies for automation and smart production systems. Another important objective is to provide examples of success industial applications for use in workshops and in academic courses. Engineers, technicians and science students can use the wide variety of implementations as examples to learn how many different applications and challenges are included in a project like SemI40 and how it is possible to deal with topics such as automation, process optimisation, energy efficiency, swarm intelligence, machine learning for
decision making support, advanced transportation and logistics, compliance in CPS,. . .
The broad selection of articles offers engineers, scientists, technicians, and managers numerous examples of best-in-class practices by their peers. They provide results and information for a better understanding of the potential impact of some Industry4.0 aspects. Engineers, managers and scientists with a modest background in Industry4.0 topics and methodologies can understand most of the illustrated topics.
The primary objective of this collection of articles is to demonstrate how European industries and academic partners developed methods and technologies for automation and smart production systems. Another important objective is to provide examples of success industial applications for use in workshops and in academic courses. Engineers, technicians and science students can use the wide variety of implementations as examples to learn how many different applications and challenges are included in a project like SemI40 and how it is possible to deal with topics such as automation, process optimisation, energy efficiency, swarm intelligence, machine learning for decision making support, advanced transportation and logistics, compliance in CPS,... The broad selection of articles offers engineers, scientists, technicians, and managers numerous examples of best-in-class practices by their peers. They provide results and information for a better understanding of the potential impact of some Industry4.0 aspects. Engineers, managers and scientists with a modest background in Industry4.0 topics and methodologies can understand most of the illustrated topics.
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