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

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International COST 237 Workshop, held in Barcelona, Spain, in November 1996.
The 15 revised full papers presented in the volume were carefully selected from a total of 34 submissions by COST project participants as well as from outside. The papers are organized in sections on multipeer and group communication, quality of service, applications and teleservices, multimedia protocols and platforms, and performance studies.

Despite the fact that Maple V has become one of the most popular computer algebra systems on the market, surprisingly few users realize its potential in the field of scientific visualization. The purpose of this book is to equip the reader with a variety of graphics tools needed on the voyage of discovery into the complex and often beautiful world of curves and surfaces. A comprehensive treatment of Maple's graphics commands and structures is combined with an introduction to the main aspects of visual perception. Top priority is given to the use of light, color, perspective, and geometric transformations. Numerous examples, accompanied by pictures (many in color), cover all aspects of Maple graphics. The examples can be easily customized to suit the individual needs of the reader. The approach is context independent, and as such will appeal to students, educators, and researchers in a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines. For the general user at any level of experience, this book can serve as a comprehensive reference manual. For the beginner, it offers a user- friendly elementary introduction to the subject, with mathematical requirements kept to a minimum. For those interested in advanced mathematical visualization, it explains how to maximize Maple's graphical capabilities. In particular, this book shows how to turn Maple into an excellent modeling tool capable of generating elaborate surfaces that conventional modelers cannot produce. These surfaces can be exported to an external ray tracer (e.g. POV-ray) for sophisticated photo-realistic rendering. All of the Maple code segments which are presented in the book, as well as high-resolution pictures showing alternative renderingsof some of the book's color plates, are included on the accompanying DOS diskette.

The book contains 31 papers on different fields of application and the problems of modelling and organizing data in structures, the processing techniques of GIS data for queries to the system and the so-called Dynamic GIS have been reported in detail. A final paper on Computer Graphics principles is included. Its contents can be ideally collected in five chapters, in the first one some experiences on data acquisition with low cost DGPS for road survey and overview on Vehicle Navigation Systems (VNS) are shown. The second on "GIS data acquisition and evaluationa collects a sort of papers treating robust statistical techniques applied to pre-processing, analysis and testing for different kinds of GIS data. Within the topic on "image acquisition and preprocessinga in particular some experiences on test and calibration of different scanners for GIS data acquisition are reported as well as some original approaches to the automatic DTM generation for cartographic and close range applications. Finally, some applications to the environmental monitoring and to the use of different kinds of geodetic data in multipurpose regional GIS, together with some examples of the applicability of multimedia technology to architecture and civil engineering is shown.

Multimedia Information Systems explores the technical, human, organizational and socio-economic issues which underpin the implementation and use of multimedia information systems. This unique book comprehensively defines multimedia information systems and its emerging architecture. Today's important issues of networked multimedia information systems and multimedia trafficking on the information superhighway are thoroughly investigated. Multimedia information systems applications and organizational implications are also discussed along with multimedia authoring systems. Multimedia Information Systems is essential reading for all students and professionals faced with the challenges of multimedia information systems management and development. Multimedia Information Systems develops an awareness of the problems associated with multimedia information systems management, and the ability to understand and address these emerging challenges on an organizational and technical level. The book explores the limitations of multimedia on the information superhighway, and offers solutions for present and future development on the Internet. This book also scrutinizes the current applications of multimedia information systems, and examines how they can be developed. Multimedia Information Systems serves as an excellent text for courses on the subject, and as an invaluable reference for multimedia information systems professionals.

Human Face Recognition Using Third-Order Synthetic Neural Networks explores the viability of the application of High-order synthetic neural network technology to transformation-invariant recognition of complex visual patterns. High-order networks require little training data (hence, short training times) and have been used to perform transformation-invariant recognition of relatively simple visual patterns, achieving very high recognition rates. The successful results of these methods provided inspiration to address more practical problems which have grayscale as opposed to binary patterns (e.g., alphanumeric characters, aircraft silhouettes) and are also more complex in nature as opposed to purely edge-extracted images - human face recognition is such a problem. Human Face Recognition Using Third-Order Synthetic Neural Networks serves as an excellent reference for researchers and professionals working on applying neural network technology to the recognition of complex visual patterns.

Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases addresses the future need for sophisticated search techniques that will be required to find relevant information in large digital data repositories, such as digital libraries and other multimedia databases. Because of the dramatically increasing amount of multimedia data available, there is a growing need for new search techniques that provide not only fewer bits, but also the most relevant bits, to those searching for multimedia digital data. This book serves to bridge the gap between classic ranking of text documents and modern information retrieval where composite multimedia documents are searched for relevant information. Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases begins to pave the way for speech retrieval; only recently has the search for information in speech recordings become feasible. This book provides the necessary introduction to speech recognition while discussing probabilistic retrieval and text retrieval, key topics in classic information retrieval. The book then discusses speech retrieval, which is even more challenging than retrieving text documents because word boundaries are difficult to detect, and recognition errors affect the retrieval effectiveness. This book also addresses the problem of integrating information retrieval and database functions, since there is an increasing need for retrieving information from frequently changing data collections which are organized and managed by a database system. Multimedia Information Retrieval: Content-Based Information Retrieval from Large Text and Audio Databases serves as an excellent reference source and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

In the last few years multimedia hardware and applications have become widely available on PC and workstations. Moreover, through the tremendous development and the wide usage of the World Wide Web multimedia applications have been brought over the network to many people. This book presents the results of the fourth in a well established series of international workshops on Multimedia organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association, and held from May 28 to 30, 1996, in Rostock, Germany. The workshop had the special topic Multimedia on the Net and was the follow up of the EUROGRAPHICS Symposium and Workshop on Multimedia held in Graz in June 1994. The workshop program consisted of an invited keynote speech and five technical sessions. The fifteen contributions selected for this volume treat topics of particular interest in current research and address actual problems of the use of multimedia in distributed applications over the network. According to the technical sessions they can be roughly structured in the parts concepts for handling multimedia data, still and motion pictures on the net, WWW and multimedia, collaborative multimedia, and multimedia and education. Concepts for handling multimedia data are addressed in two contributions. The first treats a frame based presentation model for distributed information systems (Kirste), the other one presents a temporal logic formalism for specifying navigational transformation in hypermedia applications (Mere et al.).

27 contributions treat the state of the art in Monte Carlo and Finite Element methods for radiosity and radiance. Further special topics dealt with are the use of image maps to capture light throughout space, complexity, volumetric stochastic descriptions, innovative approaches to sampling and approximation, and system architecture. The Rendering Workshop proceedings are an obligatory piece of literature for all scientists working in the rendering field, but they are also very valuable for the practitioner involved in the implementation of state of the art rendering system certainly influencing the scientific progress in this field.

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

This book contains revised refereed papers selected from the presentations at the First International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, held in University Park, PA, USA, in August 1995.
The 23 full papers included are divided into sections on low-level processing, vectorization and segmentation of scanned graphics documents; symbol and diagram recognition, map processing, interpretation of engineering drawings. Each section contains both survey articles to assess the state of the art, and research papers presenting novel results. One section is devoted to a contest held to determine the best algorithm for detection of dashed lines in drawings. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions and recommendations of the discussions held during the workshop.

Lotus Notes is one of the most successful and versatile groupware products on the market today and is used widely in both large and small organisations. Transforming Organisations Through Groupware - Lotus Notes in Action contains a selection of carefully chosen case studies which illustrate the implementational, organisational and commercial consequences of using Lotus Notes. These case studies have been chosen for their international appeal and, unlike other books on Lotus Notes, concentrate on the added value that can be gained by using Notes - rather than on the technical aspects of how to make the software work.

During the past few years, we have been witnessing the rapid growth of the ap plications of Interactive Digital Video, Multimedia Computing, Desktop Video Teleconferencing, Virtual Reality, and High Definition Television (HDTV). An other information revolution which is tied to Cyberspace is almost within reach. The information, data, text, graphics, video, sound, etc., in the form of multi media, can be requested, accessed, distributed, and transmitted to potentially every household. This is changing and will continue to change the way of people doing business, functioning in the society, and entertaining. In the foreseeable future, many personalized, portable information terminals, which can be car ried while traveling, will provide the link to central computer network to allow information exchange including videos from a node to node, from a center to a node, or nodes. Facing this opportunity, the question is what are the major significant technical challenges that people have to solve to push the-state-of-the-art for the realiza tion of the above mentioned technology advancement? From our professional judgement We feel that one of the major technical challenges is in Video Data Compression. Video communications in the form of desktop teleconferencing, videophone, network video delivery on demand, even games, are going to be major media traveling in the information super highway, hopping from one node in the Cyberspace to the other."

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

This volume contains a thoroughly refereed collection of revised full papers selected from the presentations at the First East-West International Conference on Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Virtual Reality, MHVR'94, held in Moscow, Russia, in September 1994.
The 22 full papers presented in the book were selected from a total of 76 initial submissions and have been carefully updated for publication. Also included are two invited papers and summaries by the session chairpersons. The volume is organized in chapters on hypermedia models and architectures, enhancing multimedia support, new technologies for virtual reality, hypermedia and multimedia for group collaboration, hypermedia and multimedia for learning, and personalized hypermedia.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Second COST 237 International Workshop, held in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 1995 in the framework of the CEC COST 237 Multimedia Telecommunications Services Project.
The 15 papers included in revised full versions were chosen from 24 workshop submissions individually solicited from groups of researchers and developers known to be active in the areas of interest. The papers are grouped in sections on multipeer communications, teleservices and applications support, broadband network and transport services, QoS assurance, and multimedia support.

Video technology promises to be the key for the transmission of motion video. A number of video compression techniques and standards have been introduced in the past few years, particularly the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 for interactive multimedia and for digital NTSC and HDTV applications, and H.2611H.263 for video telecommunications. These techniques use motion estimation techniques to reduce the amount of data that is stored and transmitted for each frame. This book is about these motion estimation algorithms, their complexity, implementations, advantages, and drawbacks. First, we present an overview of video compression techniques with an emphasis to techniques that use motion estimation, such as MPEG and H.2611H.263. Then, we give a survey of current motion estimation search algorithms, including the exhaustive search and a number of fast search algorithms. An evaluation of current search algorithms, based on a number of experiments on several test video sequences, is presented as well. The theoretical framework for a new fast search algorithm, Densely-Centered Uniform-P Search (DCUPS), is developed and presented in the book. The complexity of the DCUPS algorithm is comparable to other popular motion estimation techniques, however the algorithm shows superior results in terms of compression ratios and video qUality. We should stress out that these new results, presented in Chapters 4 and 5, have been developed by Joshua Greenberg, as part of his M.Sc. thesis entitled "Densely-Centered Uniform P-Search: A Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm" (FAU, 1996).

This book addresses the changing role of networks and the evolving structure of an Infrastructure Superhighway. The requirements for leadership in telecommunications are reviewed from different viewpoints: Network operators, equipment manufacturers, software developers and user organizations. Emphasis is placed on multimedia and what multimedia solutions would mean to telephone utilities and endusers. Based on extensive research undertaken in Europe, US and Japan, Dimitris Chorafas identifies new domains of applications, presents the breakthroughs which have currently been achieved and outlines the systems solutions necessary to fruitfully exploit new technology.

Representation and Retrieval of Visual Media in Multimedia Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date researcg results in this important area. Representation and Retrieval of Visual Media in Multimedia Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first European Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Services, IDMS'96, held in Berlin, Germany in March 1996.
The 21 revised papers included were carefully selected for presentation at the workshop; they examine current and new approaches to interactive distributed multimedia systems and services from different points of view, including research and development, management, and users. Among the topics addressed are application development support, multimedia services on demand, multimedia conferencing, multimedia networking, continuous-media streams, multimedia experiments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the international Symposium on Graph Drawing, GD '95, held in Passau, Germany, in September 1995.
The 40 full papers and 12 system demonstrations were selected from a total of 88 submissions and include, in their revised versions presented here, the improvements suggested during the meeting. This book also contains a report on the graph-drawing contest held in conjunction with GD '95. Graph drawing is concerned with the problem of visualizing structural information, particularly by constructing geometric representations of abstract graphs and networks. The importance of this area for industrial applications is testified by the large number of people with industrial affiliations, submitting papers and participating in the meeting.

Selected papers from this year's Workshops on Virtual Environments and on Visualization in Scientific Computing are included in this volume. The papers on VE discuss Virtual Environment System architecture, communication requirements, synthetic actors, crowd simulations and modeling aspects, application experience in surgery support, geographic information systems, and engineering and virtual housing systems. Contributions from the Visualization workshop are presented in four groups: volume rendering, user interfaces in scientific visualization, architecture of scientific visualization systems and flow visualization.

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 papers in this volume are a good sampling and overview of current solutions to the problems of creating graphically based systems. This breadth of scope comes out of the closing discussion at the Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Object-Oriented Graphics. The fifth workshop, on Programming Paradigms in Graphics, set out to provide answers and alternatives to the shortcomings of object-oriented graphics. The presentations investigated the applicability, merits and problems of various programming paradigms in computer graphics for design, modelling and implementation. This book contains a revised selection of the best papers from the Fifth Eurograph ics Workshop on Programming Paradigms in Graphics, held 2-3 September 1995 in Maastricht, The etherlands. All papers at the workshop were subjected to a thorough review by at least three members of the international programme committee. The se lection for this book was based on further review and the papers also incorporate the relevant aspects of the discussions at the workshop. In past Eurographics workshops on Object-Oriented Graphics the prominent trend has been a discovery of the limits of object-orientation in graphics. The limitations of object-orientation were felt to lie in such areas as the expression of relationships between objects. This is an area of particular strength for the declarative languages, such as constraint-based languages. On the other hand, a notion of state has long been a problem in declarative languages and yet it is often seen as an essential aspect of graphical modelling, particularly in simulation and animation."