The very word "digital" has acquired a status that far exceeds its humble dictionary definition. Even the prefix digital, when associ ated with familiar sectors such as radio, television, photography and telecommunications, has reinvented these industries, and provided a unique opportunity to refresh them with new start-up companies, equipment, personnel, training and working practices - all of which are vital to modern national and international economies. The last century was a period in which new media stimulated new job opportunities, and in many cases created totally new sectors: video competed with film, CDs transformed LPs, and computer graphics threatened traditional graphic design sectors. Today, even the need for a physical medium is in question. The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain intro duces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analog archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that we address in this book. Authors from around the world were invited to comment on different aspects of digital content creation, and their contributions form the 23 chapters of this volume.

Human Identification Based on Gait is the first book to address gait as a biometric. Biometrics is now in a unique position where it affects most people's lives. This is especially true of "gait," which is one of the most recent biometrics. Recognizing people by the way they walk and run implies analyzing movement which, in turn, implies analyzing sequences of images, thus requiring memory and computational performance that became available only recently. Human Identification Based on Gait introduces developments from distinguished researchers within this relatively new area of biometrics. This book clearly establishes how human gait is biometric.

Human Identification Based on Gait is structured to meet the needs of professionals in industry, as well as advanced-level students in computer science.

Visual languages have long been lit pursuitofeffective communication 00 tween human and machine. Today, they are suecessfully employed for e: nd user progmmming, modeliog, rapid prototypmg, and design activities by people ofmany disciplines including arehitects, artists, children, engi neers, and scientists. Furthermore. with rapid advances ofthe Internet and Web technology, human human communication through the Web or eleo tronie mobile deviees is becoming more and moreprevalent This manuscript provides a comprehensive introduetion to diagmmmatiooI visual programming languages and the technologyofautomatie genemtion ofsnch languages. It covers a broad rangeofcontents from the underlying theoryofgraph grammars to the applications in various domains. Thecon tents were ex: l: l: aeted from the papers that my Ph. D. students and I have published in the last 10 years. and are updated and organized in a coherent fashion. The manuseript gives an in. -depth treatmentof all the topic areas. Pointers to related work and further readings are also faeilitated at the end ofeverychapterexeeptChapter 9. Rather than describing how to program visually, the manuscript discusses what are visual programming languages, and how sooh languages and their underlying foundations can be usefully applied to other fields incomputer science that need graphs as the p: rimary meansofrepresentation. Assuming the basic knowledge of computer programming and compiler co: nstruetion, the manuscript can be used as a textbook for senior orgradu ate computer science classes on visual languages, or a reference book for programming language classes, practitioners, and researchers inthe related field. The manuscript cannot be completed without the helps of many people.

TO COMPUTER GRAPHICS BASED ONGKS Part I gives an introduction to basic concepts of computer graph ics and to the principles and concepts of GKS. The aims of this part are twofold: to provide the beginner with an overview of the terminology and concepts of computer graphics, based on GKS, and to give the computer graphics expert an introduc tion to the GKS standard. In the early chapters of this part, the main areas of computer graphics, the various classes of com puter graphics users, the interfaces of GKS and its underlying design concepts are discussed and important terms are defined. The later chapters give an informal introduction to the main concepts of GKS and their interrelationships: output, attributes, coordinate systems, transformations, input, segments, metafile, state lists, and error handling. This introduction to the GKS framework will prepare the ground for the detailed description of 2D GKS functions in Part III and the 3D extensions to GKS in Part IV. 1 WHAT IS COMPUTER GRAPHICS? 1. 1 Defmition of Computer Graphics The Data Processing Vocabulary of the International Organization for Stan dardization (ISO) ISO 84] defines Computer Graphics as follows: "Methods and techniques for converting data to and from a graphic display via computer. " This definition refers to three basic components of any computer graphics system - namely "data," "computer," and "display.""

Multimedia information systems are quite different from traditional information systems, especially in data types, modeling, delivery, and user interface. The large size of multimedia data and the high bandwidth requirement of multime dia streams require new storage, buffering, delivery, and networking schemes. The presentational nature of multimedia applications requires a proper syn chronization between multimedia streams, and the composition of multimedia documents in the distributed environment should overcome the heterogeneity of underlying systems. This book is edited for undergraduate and graduate students studying mul timedia information and applications, researchers and developers of various multimedia software and hardware systems, multimedia tool developers, user interface designers, and network protocol designers by including 17 chapters focused on the following major issues: * Disk scheduling and storage hierarchy. * Configuration of multimedia servers and buffer management. * Delivery scheduling for multimedia streams. * Supporting user interactions. Document modeling and temporal modeling of multimedia data. * * Integrated multimedia information system.

Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essentially the story of the Microcosm hypermedia research and development project that started in the late 1980's and from which has emerged a philosophy that re-examines the whole concept of hypermedia and its role in the evolution of multimedia information systems. The book presents the complete story of Microcosm to date. It sets the development of Microcosm in the context of the history of the subject from which it evolved, as well as the developments in the wider world of technology over the last two decades including personal computing, high-speed communications, and the growth of the Internet. These all lead us towards a world of global integrated information environments: the publishing revolution of the 20th century, in principle making vast amounts of information available to anybody anywhere in the world. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach explains the role that open hypermedia systems and link services will play in the integrated information environments of the future. It considers issues such as authoring, legacy systems and data integrity issues, and looks beyond the simple hypertext model provided in the World Wide Web and other systems today to the world of intelligent information processing agents that will help us deal with the problems of information overload and maintenance. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach will be of interest to all those who are involved in designing, implementing and maintaining hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web by setting the groundwork for producing a system that is both easy to use and easy to maintain. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essential reading for anyone involved in the provision of online information.

Information Retrieval (IR) has concentrated on the development of information management systems to support user retrieval from large collections of homogeneous textual material. A variety of approaches have been tried and tested with varying degrees of success over many decades of research. Hypertext (HT) systems, on the other hand, provide a retrieval paradigm based on browsing through a structured information space, following pre-defined connections between information fragments until an information need is satisfied, or appears to be. Information Retrieval and Hypertext addresses the confluence of the areas of IR and HT and explores the work done to date in applying techniques from one area, to the other leading to the development of hypertext information retrieval' (HIR) systems. An important aspect of the work in IR/HT and in any user-centred information system is the emergence of multimedia information and such multimedia information is treated as an integral information type in this text. The contributed chapters cover the development of integrated hypertext information retrieval models, and the application of IR and HT techniques in hypertext construction and the approaches that can be taken in searching HIR systems. These chapters are complemented by two overview chapters covering, respectively, information retrieval and hypertext research and developments. Information Retrieval and Hypertext is important as it is the first text to directly address the combined searching/browsing paradigm of information discovery which is becoming so important in modern computing environments. It will be of interest to researchers and professionals working in a range of areas related to information discovery.

Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems addresses the problems and challenges of handling several continuous- media data streams in networked multimedia environments. The work demonstrates how resource management mechanisms can be integrated into a stream handling system. The resulting system includes functions for Quality of Service (QoS) calculations, scheduling, determination of resource requirements, and methods to reduce resource requirements. The work explains the following: a suitable system architecture and resource management scheme that allows for the provision and enforcement of QoS guarantee, resource scheduling mechanisms for CPU and buffer space, mechanisms to measure and collect resource requirements, methods to extend resource management to future scenarios by allowing the reservation of resources in advance and offering sealing mechanisms. . Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Systems is a comprehensive view of resource management for a broad technical audience that includes computer scientists and engineers involved in developing multimedia applications.

Multimedia computing has emerged in the last few years as a major area of research. Multimedia computer systems have opened a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio and full-motion video. Looking at the big picture, multimedia can be viewed as the merging of three industries: computer, communications, and broadcasting industries. Research and development efforts can be divided into two areas. As the first area of research, much effort has been centered on the stand-alone multimedia workstation and associated software systems and tools, such as music composition, computer-aided education and training, and interactive video. However, the combination of multimedia computing with distributed systems offers even greater potential. New applications based on distributed multimedia systems include multimedia information systems, collaborative and video conferencing systems, on-demand multimedia services, and distance learning. Multimedia Systems and Techniques is one of two volumes published by Kluwer, both of which provide a broad introduction into this fast moving area. The book covers fundamental concepts and techniques used in multimedia systems. The topics include multimedia objects and related models, multimedia compression techniques and standards, multimedia interfaces, multimedia storage techniques, multimedia communication and networking, multimedia synchronization techniques, multimedia information systems, scheduling in multimedia systems, and video indexing and retrieval techniques. Multimedia Systems and Techniques, together with its companion volume, Multimedia Tools and Applications, is intended for anyone involved in multimedia system design and applications and can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia.

Real World Speech Processing brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast-moving area. The contributors to this work were selected from the leading researchers and practitioners in this field.
The work, originally published as Volume 36, Numbers 2-3 of the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems for Signal, Image, and Video Technology, will be valuable to anyone working or researching in the field of speech processing. It serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging issues being examined today.

This book contains the thoroughly refereed post-conferernce proceedings of the 13th Information Hiding Conference, IH 2011, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in May 2011. Included in this volume are 23 carefully reviewed papers that were selected out of 69 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections on: fingerprinting, anonymity and privacy, steganography and steganalysis, watermarking, digital rights management and digital forensics, and digital hiding in unusual context. Also included are the papers that were presented as part of the special session dedicated to the BOSS (Break Our Steganographic System) contest.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2011 - formerly known as ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries) - held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2011. The 27 full papers, 13 short papers, 9 posters and 9 demos presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 initial submissions. In addition the book contains the abstract of 2 keynote speeches and an appendix stating information on the doctoral consortium, as well as the panel, which were held at the conference. The papers are grouped in topical sections on networked information, semantics and interoperability, systems and architectures, text and multimedia retrieval, collaborative information spaces, DL applications and legal aspects, user interaction and information visualization, user studies, archives and repositories, europeana, and preservation.

The two-volume set LNCS 6468-6469 contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at the eight workshops that were held in conjunction with the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2010.From a total of 167 submissions to all workshops, 89 papers were selected for publication. The contributions are grouped together according to the main workshops topics, which were: computational photography and aesthetics; computer vision in vehicle technology: from Earth to Mars; electronic cultural heritage; subspace based methods; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; visual surveillance; application of computer vision for mixed and augmented reality.

Testing of Communicating Systems presents the latest international results in both the theory and industrial practice of the testing of communicating systems. The topics discussed range from tools and techniques for testing to test standards, frameworks, notations, algorithms, fundamentals of testing, and industrial experiences and issues. The tools and techniques discussed apply to conformance testing, interoperability testing, performance testing of communications software, Internet protocols and applications, and multimedia and distributed systems in general, such as systems for electronic commerce. This volume contains the extensively refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Testing of Communicating Systems (TestCom 2000), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in early September 2000. Testing of Communicating Systems is essential reading for engineers, designers, managers of IT products and services, and all researchers interested in advancing the technology of engineering Internet frameworks, systems, services, and applications for reliability and quality.

The two-volume set LNCS 6987 and 6988 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining, WISM 2011, held in Taiyuan, China, in September 2011. The 112 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 472 submissions. The second volume includes 56 papers organized in the following topical sections: management information systems; semantic Web and ontologies; Web content mining; Web information classification; Web information extraction; Web intelligence; Web interfaces and applications; Web services and e-learning; and XML and semi-structured data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2011, held in Galway, Ireland in August 2011. The 13 revised full papers, 12 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The papers address all current topics in Semantic Web, interplay between classical reasoning approach with welll established web languages such as RDF and OWL, reasoning languages, querying and optimization and rules and ontologies.

Extracting content from text continues to be an important research problem for information processing and management. Approaches to capture the semantics of text-based document collections may be based on Bayesian models, probability theory, vector space models, statistical models, or even graph theory.

As the volume of digitized textual media continues to grow, so does the need for designing robust, scalable indexing and search strategies (software) to meet a variety of user needs. Knowledge extraction or creation from text requires systematic yet reliable processing that can be codified and adapted for changing needs and environments.

This book will draw upon experts in both academia and industry to recommend practical approaches to the purification, indexing, and mining of textual information. It will address document identification, clustering and categorizing documents, cleaning text, and visualizing semantic models of text.

Rapid Application Generation of Business and Finance Software describes a method for developing wide ranging computing applications with emerging software technologies. The pressure of the market place calls for reducing the time to market of new software applications. This book shows how to build such software faster and more reliably. Using an elegant concept of extended tools, the book presents a method for the constructive building of hybrid' applications. The book includes such application areas as direct marketing, banking insurance and executive information systems. The methods used adopt the latest object-oriented and client-server techniques. Rapid Application Generation of Business and Finance Software is an important book for computer scientists working on rapid application development. It is also of interest to information systems specialists.

Pollutants released to the environment are distributed among the many environmental media such as air, water, soil, and vegetation, as the result of complex physical, chemical and biological processes. The possible environmental impact associated with chemical pollutants is related to their concentration levels and persistence in the various environmental compartments. Therefore, information regarding the migration of pollutants across environmental phase boundaries (eg., air-water, soil-water) and their accumulation in the environment is essential if we are to assess the potential environmental impact and the associated risks. In recent years it has become apparent that environmental pollution is a multimedia problem. Risk assessment and the design of appropriate pollution control measures require that we carefully consider the transport and accumulation of pollutants in the environment. We are now recognizing that the environment must be considered as a whole, and the scientific and regulatory approaches must consider the interactions of environmental media. It is also becoming apparent that single-medium approaches are partial and often counter-productive. On the other hand any multimedia program must carefully consider the rate of each environmental medium in the overall multimedia scheme.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 34th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2011, held in Berlin, Germany, in October 2011. The 32 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are divided in topical sections on computational learning and datamining, knowledge representation and reasonings, augmented reality, swarm intelligence; and planning and scheduling.

As the Internet and the WWW impact on corporate and private activities, the human-computer interface is becoming a central issue for the designers of these systems. Such interfaces will decide the success or failure of future technologies, which will have to provide users with easy-to-use 'intelligent' problem solving tools.
'Intelligent Agents' are likely to play a significant role in the design of these interfaces, and this book explores how they are starting to influence media-based systems.
As you read Intelligent Agents for Mobile and Virtual Media, you will discover the considerable advances that have already been made on the long journey towards a day when computers will be truly described as an intelligent aid to our personal and business lives.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

The primary thesis here is the authors' belief that the emergence of computers as an elemental force in our society must be viewed with a sceptical eye. Crandall and Levich, one a mathematician, the other a philosopher, strive, however, to present a balanced viewpoint, investigating and reflecting on the good and bad sides of this revolution, and seek meaning in this "Information Age". Their examination is stripped of journalistic hyperbole, the cries of self-serving prophets, and the sales pitches of the soft- and hardware industries. In separating the wheat from the chaff, the authors provide readers with a much better understanding of the limitations of these new technologies, along with propositions for their better use and within the societal context.

The two-volume set LNCS 6468-6469 contains the carefully selected and reviewed papers presented at the eight workshops that were held in conjunction with the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, in Queenstown, New Zealand, in November 2010.From a total of 167 submissions to all workshops, 89 papers were selected for publication. The contributions are grouped together according to the main workshops topics, which were: computational photography and aesthetics; computer vision in vehicle technology: from Earth to Mars; electronic cultural heritage; subspace based methods; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; visual surveillance; application of computer vision for mixed and augmented reality.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on E-learning and Games, Edutainment 2011, held in Taipeh, Taiwan, in September 2011.

The 42 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on: augemented and mixed reality in education; effectiveness of virtual reality for education; ubiquituous games and ubiquitous technology & learning; future classroom; e-reader and multi-touch; learning performance and achievement; learning by playing; game design and development; game-based learning/training; interactions in games; digital museum and technology, and behavior in games; educational robots and toys; e-learning platforms and tools; game engine/rendering/animations; game-assisted language learning; learning with robots and robotics education; e-portfolio and ICT-enhanced learning; game-based testing and assessment; trend, development and learning process of educational mini games; VR and edutainment.