In many applications, e.g., bioinformatics, web access traces, system u- lization logs, etc., the data is naturally in the form of sequences. It has been of great interests to analyze the sequential data to find their inherent char- teristics. The sequential pattern is one of the most widely studied models to capture such characteristics. Examples of sequential patterns include but are not limited to protein sequence motifs and web page navigation traces. In this book, we focus on sequential pattern mining. To meet different needs of various applications, several models of sequential patterns have been proposed. We do not only study the mathematical definitions and application domains of these models, but also the algorithms on how to effectively and efficiently find these patterns. The objective of this book is to provide computer scientists and domain - perts such as life scientists with a set of tools in analyzing and understanding the nature of various sequences by : (1) identifying the specific model(s) of - quential patterns that are most suitable, and (2) providing an efficient algorithm for mining these patterns. Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Data Mining is the process of extracting implicit knowledge and discovery of interesting characteristics and patterns that are not explicitly represented in the databases. The techniques can play an important role in understanding data and in capturing intrinsic relationships among data instances. Data mining has been an active research area in the past decade and has been proved to be very useful.

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration. The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized. Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts presents contributions from leading researchers and experts describing their current research and their views of the future trends in the field. The book consists of thirteen chapters in five parts. These chapters tackle a number of critical issues in distributed multimedia systems and applications - from VLSI processors that support multimedia and multimedia servers, through multimedia databases and multimedia networks and communications, to merging multimedia applications. Only a few years ago multimedia seemed like a brand new research field and an emerging new industry. Today, at the edge of the 21st century, multimedia research is coming of age, and the multimedia industry has significantly grown with the total market estimated to be about $50 billion. Several years ago it was felt that the digital media revolution had just started; however, the seeds had been sown long before. Fundamental technologies, such as interactive laser disks, video games, and electronic encyclopedias were invented in the 1970s and 80s. They represented the seeds for current hot' applications, such as digital libraries, video-on-demand, interactive television, and videoconferencing. Another aspect of the digital media revolution is the formation of a new media industry composed of computer, entertainment, communication, and consumer electronics companies. Many industry segments are currently involved in creating new products and services, positioning themselves for the 21st century. They include telephone, cable, and satellite TV companies, communication equipment companies, TV and radio broadcasters, on-line Internet service providers, cable channels, movie studios, record companies, book publishers, CD-ROM title creators, Internet tool vendors, multimedia software tools companies, computer companies, general software tools companies, computer add-on vendors, semiconductor vendors, and consumer electronics vendors. Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century: Visions of World Experts should stimulate the curiosity of its readers and inspire new technological breakthroughs in this exciting field. It serves as a valuable reference for system designers, engineers, programmers, and managers who are involved in multimedia systems, the Internet, and their applications. This book can also be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia in engineering curricula.

One of the most intriguing problems in video processing is the removal of the redundancy or the compression of a video signal. There are a large number of applications which depend on video compression. Data compression represents the enabling technology behind the multimedia and digital television revolution. In motion compensated lossy video compression the original video sequence is first split into three new sources of information, segmentation, motion and residual error. These three information sources are then quantized, leading to a reduced rate for their representation but also to a distorted reconstructed video sequence. After the decomposition of the original source into segmentation, mo tion and residual error information is decided, the key remaining problem is the allocation of the available bits into these three sources of information. In this monograph a theory is developed which provides a solution to this fundamental bit allocation problem. It can be applied to all quad-tree-based motion com pensated video coders which use a first order differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) scheme for the encoding of the displacement vector field (DVF) and a block-based transform scheme for the encoding of the displaced frame differ ence (DFD). An optimal motion estimator which results in the smallest DFD energy for a given bit rate for the encoding of the DVF is also a result of this theory. Such a motion estimator is used to formulate a motion compensated interpolation scheme which incorporates a global smoothness constraint for the DVF."

Researchers in data management have recently recognized the importance of a new class of data-intensive applications that requires managing data streams, i.e., data composed of continuous, real-time sequence of items. Streaming applications pose new and interesting challenges for data management systems. Such application domains require queries to be evaluated continuously as opposed to the one time evaluation of a query for traditional applications. Streaming data sets grow continuously and queries must be evaluated on such unbounded data sets. These, as well as other challenges, require a major rethink of almost all aspects of traditional database management systems to support streaming applications.

Stream Data Management comprises eight invited chapters by researchers active in stream data management. The collected chapters provide exposition of algorithms, languages, as well as systems proposed and implemented for managing streaming data.

Stream Data Management is designed to appeal to researchers or practitioners already involved in stream data management, as well as to those starting out in this area. This book is also suitable for graduate students in computer science interested in learning about stream data management.

With the rapidly increasing penetration of laptop computers and mobile phones, which are primarily used by mobile users to access Internet s- vices like e-mail and World Wide Web (WWW) access, support of Internet services in a mobile environment is an emerging requirement. Wireless n- works have been used for communication among fully distributed users in a multimedia environment that has the needs to provide real-time bursty traffic (such as voice or video) and data traffic with excellent reliability and service quality. To satisfy the huge wireless multimedia service demand and improve the system performance, efficient channel access methods and analytical methods must be provided. In this way very accurate models, that faithfully reproduce the stochastic behavior of multimedia wireless communication and computer networks, can be constructed. Most of these system models are discrete-time queueing systems. Queueing networks and Markov chains are commonly used for the p- formance and reliability evaluation of computer, communication, and m- ufacturing systems. Although there are quite a few books on the individual topics of queueing networks and Markov chains, we have found none that covers the topics of discrete-time and continuous-time multichannel mul- traffic queueing networks. On the other hand, the design and development of multichannel mul- hop network systems and interconnected network systems or integrated n- works of multimedia traffic require not only such average performance m- sures as the throughput or packet delay but also higher moments of traffic departures and transmission delay.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry."

Even in the age of ubiquitous computing, the importance of the Internet will not change and we still need to solve conventional security issues. In addition, we need to deal with new issues such as security in the P2P environment, privacy issues in the use of smart cards, and RFID systems. Security and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing addresses these issues and more by exploring a wide scope of topics. The volume presents a selection of papers from the proceedings of the 20th IFIP International Information Security Conference held from May 30 to June 1, 2005 in Chiba, Japan. Topics covered include cryptography applications, authentication, privacy and anonymity, DRM and content security, computer forensics, Internet and web security, security in sensor networks, intrusion detection, commercial and industrial security, authorization and access control, information warfare and critical protection infrastructure. These papers represent the most current research in information security, including research funded in part by DARPA and the National Science Foundation.

Hard real-time systems are very predictable, but not sufficiently flexible to adapt to dynamic situations. They are built under pessimistic assumptions to cope with worst-case scenarios, so they often waste resources. Soft real-time systems are built to reduce resource consumption, tolerate overloads and adapt to system changes. They are also more suited to novel applications of real-time technology, such as multimedia systems, monitoring apparatuses, telecommunication networks, mobile robotics, virtual reality, and interactive computer games. This unique monograph provides concrete methods for building flexible, predictable soft real-time systems, in order to optimize resources and reduce costs. It is an invaluable reference for developers, as well as researchers and students in Computer Science.

This textbook was inspired by an undergraduate elective course given on virtual organizations and technology. The instructor could not find a suitable text that covered both the organizational and technological aspects including examples based on today's industry. Other books were either too strategic or too technical for an audience of undergraduate business and technology students who were to use the book. But why was that the case? For the same reason that business and IT people in industry tended not to speak the same "language": indeed, the integration of technology into business strategy has been a recent occurrence, and traditional strategy issues have been decided too high in the organizational structure while technology was too detailed in tactical implementation. With the Internet and the advent of e-commerce, m-commerce, and c-commerce (and the other letters of the alphabet soon to follow), business and technology finally started to become closer, and the interest in technology as an enabler for strategic business decision-making evolved into a mainstream concept. How are we defining a virtual organization? Most definitions of the concept of virtual organizations start with stating that it is "a network between organisations or individuals . . . ". The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines 'virtual' as: "that is such/or practical purposes, though not in name or according to a strict definition. " An organization may be thought of as a number of individuals systematically united for some end or work.

This volume presents high quality, state-of-the-art research ideas and results from theoretic, algorithmic and application viewpoints. It contains contributions by leading experts in the obsequious scientific and technological field of multimedia. The book specifically focuses on interaction with multimedia content with special emphasis on multimodal interfaces for accessing multimedia information. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. It is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary multimedia encryption and watermarking techniques, which enable a secure exchange of multimedia intellectual property. Part I, Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Multimedia, introduces DRM concepts and models for multimedia content protection, and presents the key players. Part II, Multimedia Cryptography, provides an overview of modern cryptography, with the focus on modern image, video, speech, and audio encryption techniques. This book also provides an advanced concept of visual and audio sharing techniques. Part III, Digital Watermarking, introduces the concept of watermarking for multimedia, classifies watermarking applications, and evaluates various multimedia watermarking concepts and techniques, including digital watermarking techniques for binary images. Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking is designed for researchers and practitioners, as well as scientists and engineers who design and develop systems for the protection of digital multimedia content. This volume is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on multimedia security.

Multimedia Information Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Multimedia Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Appendices 133 A Mathematical Results 133 A.1 Singularities of the Displacement Error Covariance Matrix 133 A.2 A Class of Matrices and their Eigenvalues 134 A.3 Inverse of the Power Spectral Density Matrix 134 A.4 Power Spectral Density of a Frame 136 Glossary 137 References 141 Index 159 Preface This book aims to capture recent advances in motion compensation for - ficient video compression. It investigates linearly combined motion comp- sated signals and generalizes the well known superposition for bidirectional prediction in B-pictures. The number of superimposed signals and the sel- tion of reference pictures will be important aspects of the discussion. The application oriented part of the book employs this concept to the well known ITU-T Recommendation H.263 and continues with the improvements by superimposed motion-compensated signals for the emerging ITU-T R- ommendation H.264 and ISO/IEC MPEG-4 (Part 10). In addition, it discusses a new approach for wavelet-based video coding. This technology is currently investigated by MPEG to develop a new video compression standard for the mid-term future.

Images and video play a crucial role in visual information systems and multimedia. There is an extraordinary number of applications of such systems in entertainment, business, art, engineering, and science. Such applications often involved large image and video collections, and therefore, searching for images and video in large collections is becoming an important operation. Because of the size of such databases, efficiency is crucial. We strongly believe that image and video retrieval need an integrated approach from fields such as image processing, shape processing, perception, database indexing, visualization, and querying, etc. This book contains a selection of results that was presented at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval, in December 1999. The purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from the various fields, in order to promote information exchange and interaction among researchers who are interested in various aspects of accessing the content of image and video data. The book provides an overview of the state of the art in content-based image and video retrieval. The topics covered by the chapters are integrated system aspects, as well as techniques from image processing, computer vision, multimedia, databases, graphics, signal processing, and information theory. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the fields of multimedia, visual information (database) systems, computer vision, and information retrieval.

The concept of content delivery (also known as content distribution) is be coming increasingly important due to rapidly growing demands for efficient distribution and fast access of information in the Internet. Content delivery is very broad and comprehensive in that the contents for distribution cover a wide range of types with significantly different characteristics and performance concerns, including HTML documents, images, multimedia streams, database tables, and dynamically generated contents. Moreover, to facilitate ubiqui tous information access, the network architectures and hardware devices also vary widely. They range from broadband wired/fixed networks to bandwid- constrained wireless/mobile networks, and from powerful workstations/PCs to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones with limited processing and display capabilities. All these levels of diversity are introducing numerous challenges on content delivery technologies. It is desirable to deliver contents in their best quality based on the nature of the contents, network connections and client devices. This book aims at providing a snapshot of the state-of-the-art research and development activities on web content delivery and laying the foundations for future web applications. The book focuses on four main areas: (1) web con tent delivery; (2) dynamic web content; (3) streaming media delivery; and (4) ubiquitous web access. It consists of 17 chapters written by leading experts in the field. The book is designed for a professional audience including academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are interested in the most recent research and development activities on web content delivery."

Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML aims to provide a single record of current research and practical applications in the fuzzy databases. This volume is the outgrowth of research the author has conducted in recent years. Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML introduces state-of-the-art information to the database research, while at the same time serving the information technology professional faced with a non-traditional application that defeats conventional approaches.

The research on fuzzy conceptual models and fuzzy object-oriented databases is receiving increasing attention, in addition to fuzzy relational database models. With rapid advances in network and internet techniques as well, the databases have been applied under the environment of distributed information systems. It is essential in this case to integrate multiple fuzzy database systems. Since databases are commonly employed to store and manipulate XML data, additional requirements are necessary to model fuzzy information with XML. Secondly, this book maps fuzzy XML model to the fuzzy databases. Very few efforts at investigating these issues have thus far occurred.

Fuzzy Database Modeling with XML is designed for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science.

The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state-of-the-art in system-level memory management (data transfer and storage) related issues for complex data-dominated real-time signal and data processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1989- 1997. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements and the data dominated characteristics of this domain, we have adopted a target architecture style and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and optimization of such systems feasible. Our approach is also very heavily application driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators, partly used as red-thread examples in the book. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional high-level synthesis (scheduling and allocation) or compilation (traditional or ILP oriented) tasks. The latter are mainly focussed on scalar or scalar stream operations and data where the internal structure of the complex data types is not exploited, in contrast to the approaches discussed here. The proposed methodologies are largely independent of the level of programmability in the data-path and controller so they are valuable for the realisation of both hardware and software systems. Our target domain consists of signal and data processing systems which deal with large amounts of data."

Broadband Satellite Communication Systems and the Challenges of Mobility is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of telecommunications, computer networking and wireless networks.

Recently the request of multimedia services has been rapidly increasing and satellite networks appear to be attractive for a fast service deployment and for extending the typical service area of terrestrial systems. In comparison with traditional wide area networks, a characteristic of satellite communication systems is their ability in broadcasting and multicasting multimedia information flows anywhere over the satellite coverage. The papers presented in this volume highlight key areas such as Satellite Network Architectures, Services and Applications; Mobile Satellite Systems and Services; and Hybrid Satellite and Terrestrial Networks.

Mobility will inevitably be one of the main characteristics of future networks, terminals and applications and, thus, extending and integrating fixed network protocols and services to mobile systems represents one of the main issues of present networking. The secondary focus of this volume is on challenges of mobility, that is, on technologies, protocols and services for the support of seamless and nomadic user access to new classes of applications in person-to-person, device-to-device and device-to-person environments. The book comprises recent results of research and development in the following areas; Seamless mobility; Mobile ad hoc and sensor networks; Analysis, simulation and measurements of mobile and wireless systems; Integration and inter-working of wired and wireless networks; QoS in mobile and wireless networks; Future trends and issues concerning mobility.

This state -of-the-art volume contains a collection of papers from two of the workshops of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress, held August 22-27, 2004, in Toulouse, France: the Workshop on Broadband Satellite Communication Systems, and the Workshop on the Challenges of Mobility.

Face recognition has been actively studied over the past decade and continues to be a big research challenge. Just recently, researchers have begun to investigate face recognition under unconstrained conditions. Unconstrained Face Recognition provides a comprehensive review of this biometric, especially face recognition from video, assembling a collection of novel approaches that are able to recognize human faces under various unconstrained situations. The underlying basis of these approaches is that, unlike conventional face recognition algorithms, they exploit the inherent characteristics of the unconstrained situation and thus improve the recognition performance when compared with conventional algorithms.

Unconstrained Face Recognition is structured to meet the needs of a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

3D Face Processing: Modeling, Analysis and Synthesis introduces the frontiers of 3D face processing techniques. It reviews existing 3D face processing techniques, including techniques for 3D face geometry modeling; 3D face motion modeling; and 3D face motion tracking and animation. Then it discusses a unified framework for face modeling, analysis and synthesis. In this framework, the authors present new methods for modeling complex natural facial motion, as well as face appearance variations due to illumination and subtle motion. Then the authors apply the framework to face tracking, expression recognition and face avatar for HCI interface. They conclude this book with comments on future work in the 3D face processing framework.
3D Face Processing: Modeling, Analysis and Synthesis will interest those working in face processing for intelligent human computer interaction and video surveillance. It contains a comprehensive survey on existing face processing techniques, which can serve as a reference for students and researchers. It also covers in-depth discussion on face motion analysis and synthesis algorithms, which will benefit more advanced graduate students and researchers.

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."

This book covers the MPEG H.264 and MS VC-1 video coding standards as well as issues in broadband video delivery over IP networks. This professional reference is designed for industry practitioners, including video engineers, and professionals in consumer electronics, telecommunications and media compression industries. The book is also suitable as a secondary text for advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.