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The AgroTech research group at UPC, in collaboration with its spin-off Ugiat Technologies, has developed uPlayer, a new multimedia player concept that enables more intuitive video navigation and viewing, intelligently enhancing the user experience, especially on YouTube and other platforms, by integrating as a plugin or advanced player.
Audiovisual content analysis using artificial intelligence makes it possible to automate numerous processes across the multimedia production and management chain. Current computer vision techniques recognise people, places, scenes, objects and logos, while audio analysis enables speech transcription, speaker identification and keyword detection. By combining these results with natural language processing, it becomes possible to generate summaries, classify content and extract useful metadata for indexing, search, automatic documentation, monitoring, advertising optimisation and support for content editing.
uPlayer uses this metadata to improve the viewer’s experience. For example, in a news programme, the system automatically identifies news items, people, sections and relevant concepts, enabling much more intuitive non-linear navigation than the traditional 10-second forward/back system: users can jump between headlines, filter by sections or search for appearances of specific individuals. This experience can be extended to other formats such as entertainment programmes, panel discussions or series.
To make this possible, the provider hosts its content on a video-on-demand server (YouTube, Vimeo or its own server), which is automatically analysed and integrated with a player plugin, through which the user receives the metadata that enriches playback, without the broadcaster having to modify its workflows.
In addition, users can add tags, create navigation points (favourite scenes), generate short clips and share them on social networks, as well as collaborate with other users on databases about specific characters. These metadata can be shared or published as navigation profiles. Creators, such as YouTubers, can also request automatic analysis and customise the results before distributing their content.
uPlayer is typically presented as a browser plugin (for example, Chrome) that integrates with existing video players. The system can be commercialised through analysis subscriptions, offering advanced navigation to users or providing producers with information on consumption and interaction patterns. For certain types of content, such as courses or conferences, it also enables collaborative enrichment by the community.
The AgroTech audiovisual technologies group at UPC has contributed expertise in facial recognition systems and audio and video content analysis. It has also been responsible for carrying out system quality measurements tailored to different types of content such as documentaries, interviews, classes, news programmes and series, proposing analysis strategies according to content type. Direct collaboration has taken place with Ugiat Technologies, which developed and adapted the algorithms and integrated them into the system.
Budget and funding
The project ran for 12 months (2024) and had a total budget of € 20,000.
Related Projects
- The Group of Construction Research and Innovation (GRIC) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC) leads the RESILIENT project, which develops advanced models and methodologies to assess climate-resilience strategies in buildings and optimise decision-making.
- A research team from the Sustainable Construction Engineering Group (ECS) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC), together with the Catalan company La Farga, a manufacturer of copper products and semi-finished copper products and a leader in copper recycling, has taken part in the development of a solution to use slag from the copper refining process as new materials and to optimise the use of natural resources in industry. Through this project, La Farga aims to valorise this slag for high added-value industrial applications, such as conductive cements used to manufacture road pavements or industrial sensing products.
- The UPC’s Centre for Sensors, Instruments and Systems Development (CD6) in Terrassa, alongside IDOM Engineering, has finalised the design and construction of the optical system that will calibrate the Extremely Large Telescope’s (ELT) main mirror, with a 39-metre diameter. The ELT will be the world’s largest ground-based optical and near-infrared telescope. It is currently under construction at an altitude of over 3,000 metres on Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
- A joint UPC research team, integrated by the CommSensLab-UPC, and the ICM-CSIC, is participating in the EO4TIP project, which is developing new Earth observation methodologies to detect tipping points and sudden changes at local and regional scale on Earth using high-resolution satellite data.
