CEDEO (Italy)

In recent years the concept of metaverse has evolved in the attempt of defining richer immersive and interactive environments supporting various types of virtual experiences and interactions among users. This has led to the emergence of various different metaverse platforms that utilize blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to establish ownership of metaverse elements and attach features and information to it. This article will delve into the heterogeneity of the data involved in these metaverse platforms, as well as highlight some dynamics and features of them. Moreover, the paper introduces a metaverse analysis tool developed by the authors, which leverages machine learning techniques to collect and analyze daily data, including blockchain transactions, platform-specific metadata, and social media trends. Experimental results are reported are presented with a use-case scenario focused on the trading of digital parcels, commonly referred to as metaverse real estate.

Face-based video retrieval (FBVR) is the task of retrieving videos that containing the same face shown in the query image. In this article, we present the first end-to-end FBVR pipeline that is able to operate on large datasets of unconstrained, multi-shot, multi-person videos. We adapt an existing audiovisual recognition dataset to the task of FBVR and use it to evaluate our proposed pipeline. We compare a number of deep learning models for shot detection, face detection, and face feature extraction as part of our pipeline on a validation dataset made of more than 4000 videos. We obtain 97.25% mean average precision on an independent test set, composed of more than 1000 videos. The pipeline is able to extract features from videos at sim 7 times the real-time speed, and it is able to perform a query on thousands of videos in less than 0.5 s.

Standardization is concerned with interfaces; industry is concerned with systems. This papers brings the evidence brought by the MPEG standardization group to show how, through the proper management of interface evolution, the constituent industries have been able to achieve product and service interoperability, room for differentiation, and opportunities for innovation in the context of the tectonics shift also known as convergence.

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has produced a number of successful standards that have facilitated the conversion of the various components of the media industry from an analogue to the digital world. In the process MPEG has caused an orderly restructuring of the industry from a largely vertical arrangement to a horizontal one. This has been possible thanks to a properly designed standards development process that accommodates industry practices and promotes a healthy technology competition.