There is now so much data on the Web that managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost impossible. To manage this data, provide interoperability and warehousing between multiple data sources and systems, and extract information from the databases and warehouses, various tools are being developed. In fact, developments in multimedia databa

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.

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.

Collecting the latest developments in the field, Multimedia Data Mining: A Systematic Introduction to Concepts and Theory defines multimedia data mining, its theory, and its applications. Two of the most active researchers in multimedia data mining explore how this young area has rapidly developed in recent years.The book first discusses the theore

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.

First title to ever present soft computing approaches and their application in data mining, along with the traditional hard-computing approaches Addresses the principles of multimedia data compression techniques (for image, video, text) and their role in data mining Discusses principles and classical algorithms on string matching and their role in data mining

The information age has led to an explosion in the amount of information available to the individual and the means by which it is accessed, stored, viewed, and transferred. In particular, the growth of the internet has led to the creation of huge repositories of multimedia documents in a diverse range of scientific and professional fields, as well as the tools to extract useful knowledge from them. Mining Multimedia Documents is a must-read for researchers, practitioners, and students working at the intersection of data mining and multimedia applications. It investigates various techniques related to mining multimedia documents based on text, image, and video features. It provides an insight into the open research problems benefitting advanced undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, scientists and practitioners in the fields of medicine, biology, production, education, government, national security and economics.

Traditionally, scientific fields have defined boundaries, and scientists work on research problems within those boundaries. However, from time to time those boundaries get shifted or blurred to evolve new fields. For instance, the original goal of computer vision was to understand a single image of a scene, by identifying objects, their structure, and spatial arrangements. This has been referred to as image understanding. Recently, computer vision has gradually been making the transition away from understanding single images to analyzing image sequences, or video Video understanding deals with understanding of video understanding. sequences, e.g., recognition of gestures, activities, facial expressions, etc. The main shift in the classic paradigm has been from the recognition of static objects in the scene to motion-based recognition of actions and events. Video understanding has overlapping research problems with other fields, therefore blurring the fixed boundaries. Computer graphics, image processing, and video databases have obvi ous overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to generate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Re searchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to generate the synthetic imagery. A good exam pIe of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is derived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analy sis followed by synthesis. Image processing has always overlapped with computer vision because they both inherently work directly with images.

Video Mining is an essential reference for the practitioners and academicians in the fields of multimedia search engines. Half a terabyte or 9,000 hours of motion pictures are produced around the world every year. Furthermore, 3,000 television stations broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day produce eight million hours per year, amounting to 24,000 terabytes of data. Although some of the data is labeled at the time of production, an enormous portion remains unindexed. For practical access to such huge amounts of data, there is a great need to develop efficient tools for browsing and retrieving content of interest, so that producers and end users can quickly locate specific video sequences in this ocean of audio-visual data. Video Mining is important because it describes the main techniques being developed by the major players in industry and academic research to address this problem. It is the first time research from these leaders in the field developing the next-generation multimedia search engines is being described in great detail and gathered into a single volume. Video Mining will give valuable insights to all researchers and non-specialists who want to understand the principles applied by the multimedia search engines that are about to be deployed on the Internet, in studios' multimedia asset management systems, and in video-on-demand systems.

There is now so much data on the Web that managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost impossible. To manage this data, provide interoperability and warehousing between multiple data sources and systems, and extract information from the databases and warehouses, various tools are being developed. In fact, developments in multimedia databa