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About Us Multimedia Document Analysis |
Multimedia Document AnalysisOur Multimedia Document Analysis (MDA) strategy is to identify and exploit opportunities for the capture and analysis of multimedia data that could add value to future Ricoh office products. Several years ago we recognized several important market-related and technology-related trends that indicate the increasing importance of multimedia data for office workers. However, there are significant open questions about the technology needed for systems like this. That is, what retrieval techniques can we develop that will enhance the capabilities of these systems? Also, the recent proliferation of multimedia capture devices such as Visualization interfaces for time-based media, such as audio or video. Recent projects in this area include the Video Paper system that provides a paper-based system for retrieval and browsing of multimedia. The MuVIE system is an online interface that enables browsing, creation, and editing of multimedia documents. Intelligent Meeting RoomOur Intelligent Meeting Room includes a Presentation Recorder that captures every slide image displayed on a projector, a Meeting Recorder Portal that captures video of everything that happens during a meeting, a whiteboard camera that can save a digital image of what's written on a whiteboard, and several related services, such as the ability to view projected PowerPoint slides in ten different languages. Multimedia ThumbnailsThis project considers how we might display and browse a document on a cell phone. Hindered by a very small display, but inherently providing audio output capability, we leveraged these aspects to create a browsing system that can automatically create a "tour" through a document. The tour shows enlarged versions of significant text passages and portions of images in the document accompanied by audio narration. The audio can be generated from the text by text-to-speech technology. The narrations for photos are generated from their captions.
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© 2007 Ricoh Innovations Incorporated |
digital video cameras and audio capture systems implies that the same retrieval problems common to conventional document collections will soon exist for multimedia data sets. Our approach has been to investigate problems in a breadth-first fashion. That is, after identifying a unique solution to a significant problem and developing a demonstration software implementation, we file the pertinent patent applications. Experimental investigations are then continued in parallel with further research until we are sure we have identified and addressed any related issues. 