The explosive growth of multimedia data transmission has generated a critical need for efficient, high-capacity image databases, as well as powerful search engines to retrieve image data from them. This book brings together contributions by an international all-star team of innovators in the field who share their insights into all key aspects of image database and search engine construction. Readers get in-depth discussions of the entire range of crucial image database architecture, indexing and retrieval, transmission, display, and user interface issues. And, using examples from an array of disciplines, the authors present cutting-edge applications in medical imagery, multimedia communications, earth science, remote sensing, and other major application areas.

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.

Technology has spurred the growth of huge image and video libraries, many growing into the hundreds of terabytes. As a result there is a great demand among organizations for the design of databases that can effectively support the storage, search, retrieval, and transmission of video data. Engineers and researchers in the field demand a comprehensi

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This supplement covers topics ranging from academic library funding to visual information querying.

Multimedia Mining: A Highway to Intelligent Multimedia Documents brings together experts in digital media content analysis, state-of-art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, knowledge engineers and domain experts from diverse applied disciplines. Multimedia documents are ubiquitous and often required, if not essential, in many applications today. This phenomenon has made multimedia documents widespread and extremely large. There are tools for managing and searching within these collections, but the need for tools to extract hidden useful knowledge embedded within multimedia objects is becoming pressing and central for many decision-making applications. The tools needed today are tools for discovering relationships between objects or segments within multimedia document components, such as classifying images based on their content, extracting patterns in sound, categorizing speech and music, and recognizing and tracking objects in video streams.

Digital Libraries are complex and advanced forms of information systems which extend and augment their physical counterparts by amplifying existing resources and services and enabling development of new kinds of human problem solving and expression. Their complexity arises from the data-rich domain of discourse as well as from extended demands for multi-disciplinary input, involving distributed systems architectures, structured digital documents, collaboration support, human-computer interaction, information filtering, etc. In addition to the broad range of technical issues, ethics and intellectual property rights add to the complication that is normally associated with the development, maintenance, and use of Digital Libraries. The Second European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL’98) builds upon the success of the first of this series of European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, held last year in Pisa, Italy, September 1-3, 1997. This series of conferences is partially funded by the TMR Programme of the European Commission and is actively supported and promoted by the European Research Consortium on Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The aim is to bring together the different communities involved in the development of Digital Libraries, to review progress and to discuss strategies, research and technological development (RTD) issues, as well as specific topics related to the European context. These communities include professionals from universities, research centres, industry, government agencies, public libraries, etc.

Human-Centered e-Business focuses on analysis, design and development of human-centered e-business systems. The authors illustrate the benefits of the human-centered approach in intelligent e-sales recruitment application, integrating data mining technology with decision support model for profiling transaction behavior of internet banking customers, user-centered context dependent data organization using XML, knowledge management, and optimizing the search process through human evaluation in an intelligent interactive multimedia application. The applications described in this work, facilitates both e-business analysis from a business professional's perspective, and human-centered system design from a system development perspective. These applications employ a range of internet and soft computing technologies.