The overall aim of BUSMAN is to design, implement, validate, and trial a secure and efficient system for both delivery of and access to multimedia content, and for creation of and querying large and distributed databases. Management and delivery across mobile, fixed and distributed networks are considered in order to facilitate cross-media content access. The motivation is twofold: to enable seamless and secure provider-to-customer delivery of digital content components across heterogeneous channels, and to ensure customer-friendly ease of retrieval of content in large databases when fast speed of access in a protected environment is demanded.

BUSMAN considers two classes of users for the design of the system proposed: content creator or provider, and consumer. At the provider side, advanced techniques for content cataloguing, indexing and watermarking with different levels of robustness and capacity are used to link content with metadata and resist transcoding, compression and fraudulent attacks. At the consumer side, novel highly efficient browsing and retrieval strategies are implemented to provide real-time search functionalities and very low access latency from large databases across different networks. The core research issues of BUSMAN are content annotation with self-embedded Digital Item Identification (DII) using advanced watermarking techniques, scalable multimedia cataloguing, interactive navigation over distributed networks, and non-linear querying techniques using hierarchic descriptors.

The project character is defined by the ideas of "people being the centre" and "user friendly interaction between humans and digital services". Effective and innovative human factor studies in terms of user requirements, system performance, user evaluation and best-practice are considered in the design, performance evaluation and system integration stages. The end-system will include suitable approaches for secure, fast, robust and scalable content delivery as well as seamless access through fixed and wireless networks.

Main features of the BUSMAN approach include:

At the content provider side
· Generation of "smart video" in different formats and resolutions using self-embedded metadata capable of resisting transcoding, compression and fraudulent attacks while traversing a delivery chain.
· Property management and protection by enabling content to be watermarked with different levels of robustness and capacity according to different applications.
· System performance across channels with extremely different properties and using diverse multimedia formats.
· Media partitioning and annotation using hierarchical descriptors in a suitable multi-resolution descriptor space and generation of audio-visual summaries.
· Database management using multi-resolution descriptors to provide highly efficient query-responses within large databases.
· Search engine enabling highly efficient multi-step search at different scales in a well-organized database of visual descriptors.

At the user side
· Interface for user query and automatic retrieval from large databases featuring scalability properties and low-access latency.
· A desktop user friendly interface to search for content using fixed and distributed networks
· A mobile end-user interface to search for content providing a seamlessly accessible nomadic service
· Validated and tested user interface for annotating and retrieving content, developed using user-centred design and human factors studies.