A multimedia system needs a mechanism to communicate with its environment, the Internet, clients, and applications. MPEG-7 provides a standard metadata format for global communication, but lacks the framework to let the various players in a system interact. MPEG-21 closes this gap by establishing an infrastructure for a distributed multimedia frame

A multimedia system needs a mechanism to communicate with its environment, the Internet, clients, and applications. MPEG-7 provides a standard metadata format for global communication, but lacks the framework to let the various players in a system interact. MPEG-21 closes this gap by establishing an infrastructure for a distributed multimedia framework, allowing for the creation, modification, viewing, and communication of digital items among all participants within an MPEG-21 agreement. Now you have a guide that examines the structure and potential usage of these emerging standards. Distributed Multimedia Database Technologies Supported by MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 describesthe technologies, concepts, and tools of distributed, content-based multimedia systems. It focuses on the practical uses of the technologies of MPEG and SQL/MM in these components, and on the interoperability among them (for data exchange, transactions, interaction, etc.). This book demonstrates an open distributed multimedia framework that enables these components to cooperate in a working environment, delivering rich multimedia access in an increasingly mobile world. About the Author Harald Kosch is an associate professor at the University of Klagenfurt. His domains of interest are distributed multimedia systems, multimedia databases, middleware, and Internet applications. He started research at the École Normale Supèrieure in 1993 during postgraduate study and entered the Ph.D. program in 1994, obtaining his Ph.D. degree in June 1997. He actively participates in the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)-7 and MPEG-21 standardization and is involved in several international research projects in the domain of distributed multimedia systems.

This volume provides an overview of multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery and discusses the variety of hot topics in multimedia data mining research. It describes the objectives and current tendencies in multimedia data mining research and their applications. Each part contains an overview of its chapters and leads the reader with a structured approach through the diverse subjects in the field.

The MPEG standards are an evolving set of standards for video and audio compression. MPEG 7 technology covers the most recent developments in multimedia search and retreival, designed to standardise the description of multimedia content supporting a wide range of applications including DVD, CD and HDTV. Multimedia content description, search and retrieval is a rapidly expanding research area due to the increasing amount of audiovisual (AV) data available. The wealth of practical applications available and currently under development (for example, large scale multimedia search engines and AV broadcast servers) has lead to the development of processing tools to create the description of AV material or to support the identification or retrieval of AV documents. Written by experts in the field, this book has been designed as a unique tutorial in the new MPEG 7 standard covering content creation, content distribution and content consumption. At present there are no books documenting the available technologies in such a comprehensive way. * Presents a comprehensive overview of the principles and concepts involved in the complete range of Audio Visual material indexing, metadata description, information retrieval and browsing * Details the major processing tools used for indexing and retrieval of images and video sequences * Individual chapters, written by experts who have contributed to the development of MPEG 7, provide clear explanations of the underlying tools and technologies contributing to the standard * Demostration software offering step-by-step guidance to the multi-media system components and eXperimentation model (XM) MPEG reference software * Coincides with the release of the ISO standard in late 2001. A valuable reference resource for practising electronic and communications engineers designing and implementing MPEG 7 compliant systems, as well as for researchers and students working with multimedia database technology.

As consumer costs for multimedia devices such as digital cameras and Web phones have decreased and diversity in the market has skyrocketed, the amount of digital information has grown considerably. Intelligent Multimedia Databases and Information Retrieval: Advancing Applications and Technologies details the latest information retrieval technologies and applications, the research surrounding the field, and the methodologies and design related to multimedia databases. Together with academic researchers and developers from both information retrieval and artificial intelligence fields, this book details issues and semantics of data retrieval with contributions from around the globe. As the information and data from multimedia databases continues to expand, the research and documentation surrounding it should keep pace as best as possible, and this book provides an excellent resource for the latest developments.

Computational Intelligence (CI) has emerged as a rapidly growing field over the past decade. This volume reports the exploration of CI frontiers with an emphasis on a broad spectrum of real-world applications. Such a collection of chapters has presented the state-of-the-art of CI applications in industry and will be an essential resource for professionals and researchers who wish to learn and spot the opportunities in applying CI techniques to their particular problems.

The enormous growth in the field of biotechnology necessitates the utilization of information technology for the management, flow and organization of data. The field continues to evolve with the development of new applications to fit the needs of the biomedicine. From molecular imaging to healthcare knowledge management, the storage, access and analysis of data contributes significantly to biomedical research and practice. All biomedical professionals can benefit from a greater understanding of how data can be efficiently managed and utilized through data compression, modelling, processing, registration, visualization, communication, and large-scale biological computing. In addition Biomedical Information Technology contains practical integrated clinical applications for disease detection, diagnosis, surgery, therapy, and biomedical knowledge discovery, including the latest advances in the field, such as ubiquitous M-Health systems and molecular imaging applications. - The world's most recognized authorities give their "best practices" ready for implementation - Provides professionals with the most up to date and mission critical tools to evaluate the latest advances in the field and current integrated clinical applications - Gives new staff the technological fundamentals and updates experienced professionals with the latest practical integrated clinical applications

Based on more than 10 years of teaching experience, Blanken and his coeditors have assembled all the topics that should be covered in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on multimedia retrieval and multimedia databases. The single chapters of this textbook explain the general architecture of multimedia information retrieval systems and cover various metadata languages such as Dublin Core, RDF, or MPEG. The authors emphasize high-level features and show how these are used in mathematical models to support the retrieval process. For each chapter, there’s detail on further reading, and additional exercises and teaching material is available online.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2006. The book presents 29 high-quality papers selected in a rigorous reviewing process. The papers address a wide range of hot research issues and are organized in topical sections on: XML databases and semantic web, web information systems and middleware, query processing and indexing, modelling and design issues, and more.

Annotation This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the EUC 2005 workshops held in conjunction with the IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, EUC 2005, in Nagasaki, Japan in December 2005. The 132 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 352 submissions. Topics covered by the five workshops are ubiquitous intelligence and smart worlds (UISW 2005), network-centric ubiquitous systems (NCUS 2005), security in ubiquitous computing systems (SecUbiq 2005), RFID and ubiquitous sensor networks (USN 2005), and trusted and autonomic ubiquitous and embedded systems (TAUES 2005).