This interdisciplinary collection provides a set of innovative and inventive approaches to the use of video as a research method. Building on the development of visual methods across the social sciences, it highlights a range of possibilities for making and working with video data. The collection showcases different video methods, including video diaries, video go-alongs, time-lapse video, mobile devices, multi-angle video recording, video ethnography, and ethnographic documentary. Each method is presented through a case study, showing how it can be used in practice. The authors offer pragmatic advice and discuss practical issues, including equipment, techniques and skills, analysis, and presentation. They also show how video methods can be used in a range of different contexts – at train stations, on bicycles, in schools, outdoors, and in museums – to investigate worlds that are visible, audible, tangible, and in motion. In doing so, they illuminate the theoretical possibilities that video methods offer for researching the body, identity, everyday life, affect, time, and space.

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.

Video data analytics is rapidly evolving and transforming the way we live in urban environments. Video Data Analytics for Smart City Applications: Methods and Trends, data science experts present a comprehensive review of the latest advances and trends in video analytics technologies and their extensive applications in smart city planning and engineering. The book covers a wide range of topics including object recognition, action recognition, violence detection, and tracking, exploring deep learning approaches and other techniques for video data analytics. It also discusses the key enabling technologies for smart cities and homes and the scope and application of smart agriculture in smart cities. Moreover, the book addresses the challenges and security issues in terahertz band for wireless communication and the empirical impact of AI and IoT on performance management. One contribution also provides a review of the progress in achieving the Jal Jeevan Mission Goals for institutional capacity building in the Indian State of Chhattisgarh. For researchers, computer scientists, data analytics professionals, smart city planners and engineers, this book provides detailed references for further reading and demonstrates how technologies are serving their use-cases in the smart city. The book highlights the advances and trends in video analytics technologies and extensively addresses key themes, making it an essential resource for anyone looking to gain a comprehensive understanding of video data analytics for smart city applications.

Computer vision systems attempt to understand a scene and its components from mostly visual information. The geometry exhibited by the real world, the influence of material properties on scattering of incident light, and the process of imaging introduce constraints and properties that are key to solving some of these tasks. In the presence of noisy observations and other uncertainties, the algorithms make use of statistical methods for robust inference. In this paper, we highlight the role of geometric constraints in statistical estimation methods, and how the interplay of geometry and statistics leads to the choice and design of algorithms. In particular, we illustrate the role of imaging, illumination, and motion constraints in classical vision problems such as tracking, structure from motion, metrology, activity analysis and recognition, and appropriate statistical methods used in each of these problems.

Digital Video Concepts, Methods, and Metrics: Quality, Compression, Performance, and Power Trade-off Analysis is a concise reference for professionals in a wide range of applications and vocations. It focuses on giving the reader mastery over the concepts, methods and metrics of digital video coding, so that readers have sufficient understanding to choose and tune coding parameters for optimum results that would suit their particular needs for quality, compression, speed and power. The practical aspects are many: Uploading video to the Internet is only the beginning of a trend where a consumer controls video quality and speed by trading off various other factors. Open source and proprietary applications such as video e-mail, private party content generation, editing and archiving, and cloud asset management would give further control to the end-user. Digital video is frequently compressed and coded for easier storage and transmission. This process involves visual quality loss due to typical data compression techniques and requires use of high performance computing systems. A careful balance between the amount of compression, the visual quality loss and the coding speed is necessary to keep the total system cost down, while delivering a good user experience for various video applications. At the same time, power consumption optimizations are also essential to get the job done on inexpensive consumer platforms. Trade-offs can be made among these factors, and relevant considerations are particularly important in resource-constrained low power devices. To better understand the trade-offs this book discusses a comprehensive set of engineering principles, strategies, methods and metrics. It also exposes readers to approaches on how to differentiate and rank video coding solutions.

The 2nd International Workshop on Statistical Methods in Video Processing, SMVP 2004, was held in Prague, Czech Republic, as an associated workshop of ECCV 2004, the 8th European Conference on Computer Vision. A total of 30 papers were submitted to the workshop. Of these, 17 papers were accepted for presentation and included in these proceedings, following a double-blind review process. The workshop had 42 registered participants. The focus of the meeting was on recent progress in the application of - vanced statistical methods to solve computer vision tasks. The one-day scienti?c program covered areas of high interest in vision research, such as dense rec- struction of 3D scenes, multibody motion segmentation, 3D shape inference, errors-in-variables estimation, probabilistic tracking, information fusion, optical ?owcomputation,learningfornonstationaryvideodata,noveltydetectionin- namic backgrounds, background modeling, grouping using feature uncertainty, and crowd segmentation from video. We wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers for their interest in the workshop.Wealsowishtothankthemembersofourprogramcommitteeandthe external reviewers for their commitment of time and e?ort in providing valuable recommendations for each submission. We are thankful to Vaclav Hlavac, the General Chair of ECCV 2004, and to Radim Sara, for the local organization of the workshop and registration management. We hope you will ?nd these proceedings both inspiring and of high scienti?c quality.

Material Methods brings together resources for researchers investigating both the material, as well as the social world through material objects we design, buy, make, exchange and collect. It covers the whole research process, from theoretical underpinnings, selection of methods and their possible uses, as well as representing and analysing data. It introduces students and researchers to the wide range of cross-disciplinary methods which help us to approach and interpret material culture and materials. The book also provides students and researchers with the tools to critically reflect upon pre-existing methods to see their limitations as well as possibilities, and apply them to their own research practice.