A summary of Multimedia Content Creation using Global Network Cameras: The Making of CAM2

Ahmed S. Kaseb et al. GlobalSIS, 2015 DOI [0]

DISCLOSURE: I work with one of the authors (Yung-Hsiang Lu). My comments and views of the paper may be skewed due to my relationship with the author.

For the summary of the paper, go to the Summary section of this article.

Table of Contents

• A summary of Multimedia Content Creation using Global Network Cameras: The Making of CAM2
  • Table of Contents
  • First Pass
    • Problem
    • Motivation
    • Category
    • Context
    • Contributions
  • Second Pass
    • Background Work
    • Figures, Diagrams, Illustrations, and Graphs
    • Clarity
    • Relevant Work
    • Methodology
    • Author Assumptions
      • Correctness
    • Future Directions
    • Open Questions
    • Author Feedback
  • Summarization Technique
  • Citations

First Pass

Read the title, abstract, introduction, section and sub-section headings, and conclusion

There exists many cameras in the wild that are openly exposing their feeds to the interent intended or otherwise. It is therefore possible to create a database of these open cameras, access their feeds, and create new content experiences for viewers. Additionally, these feeds provide researchers with an opportunity to view real world changes longitudinally, thereby enabling studies that rely on many observations over time. This database and tooling is called CAM2 (Continuous Analysis of Many CAMeras), and it currently contains 70,000 cameras in the wild.

However, managing and providing a dataset of all this data is difficult. Furthermore, finding and reporting camera metadata including make and model as well as geographic location are also non-trivial tasks. Thus CAM2 is working towards resolving these issues for future revisions.

Problem

What is the problem addressed in the paper?

THe problem addressed in the paper is that there exists a spot in content creation and research to use the camera feeds of openly exposed devices to create new experiences and insights into the world around us.

Additionally, trying to capture this data requires a significant amount of engineering and computational resources.

Motivation

Why should we care about this paper?

Because it provides a tool to allow for the creation of new content experiences and research opportunities using open, internet exposed cameras.

Additionally, it provides a list of problems that reimplementers and extenders will face when trying to recreate similar tools.

Category

What type of paper is this work?

This is a tools paper.

Context

What other types of papers is the work related to?

This paper is related to work involving using open, internet exposed web cameras for creating new experiences and research opportunities.

Contributions

What are the author’s main contributions?

A tool to provide easy access to the internet exposed web cameras.

Second Pass

A proper read through of the paper is required to answer this

Background Work

What has been done prior to this paper?

Prior work has gone through the effort of collecting information from open, internet cameras. However, the compute and storage complexity has limited their usefulness. Furthermore, in order to make this tool useful to all researchers, as a cloud software technology, autoscaling and load balancing is a challenge as well.

Figures, Diagrams, Illustrations, and Graphs

Are the axes properly labeled? Are results shown with error bars, so that conclusions are statistically significant?

All of the images are properly labelled.

Clarity

Is the paper well written?

Yes, the paper is well written.

Relevant Work

Mark relevant work for review

The following relevant work can be found in the Citations section of this article.

• Image-Based Geographical Location Estimation Using Web Cameras [2]
• IP Geolocation Databases: Unreliable? [3]

Methodology

What methodology did the author’s use to validate their contributions?

They created a tool to allow for the analysis of many cameras continously. There was no validation mentioned w.r.t any experiments that they ran. Additionally, source code is not provided.

Author Assumptions

What assumptions does the author(s) make? Are they justified assumptions?

The only assumption that the authors make is that the cameras will remain accessible after the publication of the paper.

Correctness

Do the assumptions seem valid?

No it is not a valid assumption because the owners of these open, internet connected cameras could becgin to password protect their cameras for privacy or security concerns, thus making the usage of this tool limited or non-optimal.

Future Directions

My own proposed future directions for the work

Currently, this tool is no longer functional at the URL the author’s provide. It would be cool to recreate portions of this tool. Additionally, figuring out optimal ways of discovering internet connected cameras would be interesting as well. Furthermore, learning how to geo-locate IP addresses is also interesting.

Open Questions

What open questions do I have about the work?

How does one get access to the dataset described by the authors?

Author Feedback

What feedback would I give to the authors?

This is a pretty good tools paper. However, like many tools papers, without source code or long-term data archival, this work cannot be easily extended upon.

Summarization Technique

This paper was summarized using a modified technique proposed by S. Keshav in his work How to Read a Paper [0].

Citations