Multimedia technologies are rapidly attracting more and more interest every day. The Internet as seen from the end user is one of the reasons for this phenomenon, but not the only one. Video on Demand is one of the buzzwords today, but its real availability to the general public is yet to come. Content providers – such as publishers, broadcasting companies, and audio/video production ?rms – must be able to archive and index their productions for later retrieval. This is a formidable task, even more so when the material to be sorted encompasses many di?erent types of several media and covers a time span of several years. In order for such a vast amount of data to be easily available, existing database design models and indexing methodologies have to be improved and re?ned. In addition, new techniques especially tailored to the various types of multimedia must be devised and evaluated. For archiving and trasmission, data compression is another issue that needs to be addressed. In many cases, it has been found that compression and indexing can be successfully integrated, since compressing the data by ?ltering out irrelevancy implies some degree of und- standing of the content structure.

In the last few years we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way business, government services, education, entertainment and healthcare are operating. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia database systems and multimedia information retrieval are still challenging to both researchers and praclitioners. Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications points out these challenges and provides valuable suggestions toward the necessary solutions, by focusing on multimedia database techniques.

Everything you ever wanted to know about multimedia retrieval and management. This comprehensive book offers a full picture of the cutting-edge technologies necessary for a profound introduction to the field. Leading experts also cover a broad range of practical applications.

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.

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

Multimedia and its rich semantics are profligate in today’s digital environment. Databases and content management systems serve as essential tools to ensure that the endless supply of multimedia content are indexed and remain accessible to end users. Methods and Innovations for Multimedia Database Content Management highlights original research on new theories, algorithms, technologies, system design, and implementation in multimedia data engineering and management with an emphasis on automatic indexing, tagging, high-order ranking, and rule mining. This book is an ideal resource for university researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers and graduate students.

This volume emphasizes the primary role played by images in computer science. In the last two decades images have replaced written texts; the enormous possibilities of the image language have overcome written language in an ever-more-restricted ambit.An image is better than one thousand words; so it was straightforward to apply visual language in the field of computer science. Nowadays everything that appears on a computer screen is an image, regardless of whether it is a word or a picture. Is it possible to realize an e-learning program without working in terms of images? The answer is undoubtedly no, even if several problems arise in this context: the qualitative and quantitative content of the image we need to use for a specific task; the psychological effect on the user, including the level of attention and the correct perception of the image significance. Most of these problems form the basis of image-understanding techniques.Widespread use of images requires organization of the information in the databank or database, whose dimensions are sometimes so wide as to be too complex to manage; therefore information retrieval techniques arise from this need. The new instruments used in image and/or remote diagnosis, image transmission, the respect of the law in force and the ever-more-relevant image storage capacity required for this task imply the use of techniques of visual language and information retrieval.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in: OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings- (ISTP- / ISI Proceedings)OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)"

"This book is aimed at researchers and practitioners involved in designing and managing complex multimedia information systems"--Provided by publisher.

Multimedia Database Management Systems presents the issues and the techniques used in building multimedia database management systems. Chapter 1 provides an overview of multimedia databases and underlines the new requirements for these applications. Chapter 2 discusses the techniques used for storing and retrieving multimedia objects. Chapter 3 presents the techniques used for generating metadata for various media objects. Chapter 4 examines the mechanisms used for storing the index information needed for accessing different media objects. Chapter 5 analyzes the approaches for modeling media objects, both their temporal and spatial characteristics. Object-oriented approach, with some additional features, has been widely used to model multimedia information. The book discusses two systems that use object-oriented models: OVID (Object Video Information Database) and Jasmine. The models for representing temporal and spatial requirements of media objects are then studied. The book also describes authoring techniques used for specifying temporal and spatial characteristics of multimedia databases. Chapter 6 explains different types of multimedia queries, the methodologies for processing them and the language features for describing them. The features offered by query languages such as SQL/MM (Structured Query Language for Multimedia), PICQUERY+, and Video SQL are also studied. Chapter 7 deals with the communication requirements for multimedia databases. A client accessing multimedia data over computer networks needs to identify a schedule for retrieving various media objects composing the database. The book identifies possible ways for generating a retrieval schedule. Chapter 8 ties together the techniques discussed in the previous chapters by providing a simple architecture of a distributed multimedia database management system. Multimedia Database Management Systems can be used as a text for graduate students and researchers working in the area of multimedia databases. In addition, the book serves as essential reading material for computer professionals who are in (or moving to) the area of multimedia databases.

-Presents state-of-the-art in visual media retrieval. -Coverage of adaptive content-based retrieval systems and techniques in image and video database applications. -Includes a novel machine-controlled interactive retrieval (MCIR) method that optimizes image search in distributed digital libraries over the Internet.