This book contains mainly a selection of papers that were presented at the International Workshop on High Performance Computing/or Computer Graphics and Visualisation, held in Swansea, United Kingdom on 3-4 July 1995. The workshop was sponsored by the HEFCWI Initiative on *Parallel Computing - Foundations and Applications*, and it has provided the international computer graphics community with a platform for: * assessing and reviewing the impact of the development of high performance computing on the progress of computer graphics and visualisation; * presenting the current use of high performance computing architecture and software tools in computer graphics and visualisation, and the development of parallel graphics algorithms; * identifying potential high performance computing applications in computer graphics and visualisation, and encouraging members of the graphics community to think about their problems from the perspective of parallelism. The book is divided into six sections. The first section, which acts as the introduction of the book, gives an overview of the current state of the art It contains a comprehensive survey, by Whitman, of parallel algorithms for computer graphics and visualisation; and a discussion, by Hansen, on the past, present and future high performance computing applications in computer graphics and visualisation. The second section is focused on the design and implementation of high performance architecture, software tools and algorithms for surface rendering.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Computer Science Conference, ICSC '95, held in Hong Kong in December 1995.
ICSC '95 was devoted to computer graphics and image analysis applications. The 55 revised full papers presented together with 21 posters were selected from a total of 155 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on robot navigation and tracking, scientific visualization, feature matching and detection, geometric modeling, document processing and character recognition, rendering, 3D image analysis, image synthesis, biomedical imaging, simulation and animation, curves and surfaces, application systems, and human models.

TRACK 1: Innovative Applications in the Public Sector The integration of multimedia based applications and the information superhighway fundamentally concerns the creation of a communication technology to support the ac tivities of people. Communication is a profoundly social activity involving interactions among groups or individuals, common standards of exchange, and national infrastruc tures to support telecommunications activities. The contributions of the invited speakers and others in this track begin to explore the social dimension of communication within the context of integrated, information systems for the public sector. Interactions among businesses and households are described by Ralf Strauss through the development within a real community of a "wired city" with information and electronic services provided by the latest telecommunications technologies. A more specific type of interaction between teacher and student forms the basis of education. John Tiffin demonstrates how virtual classrooms can be used to augment the educational process. Carl Loeffler presents yet another perspective on interaction through the integration of A-life and agent technologies to investigate the dynamics of complex behaviors within networked simulation environments. Common standards for communication in the form of electronic documents or CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), according to Roland Traunmiiller, provide en abling technologies for a paradigm shift in the management of organizations. As pointed out by William Olle, the impact of standardization work on the future of information technology depends critically upon the interoperability of software systems."

Multimedia information systems are distinct from traditional information systems, particularly in terms of scheduling, media data, servers, and a number of other important issues. The relatively large size of multimedia data and the high bandwidth requirements for multimedia streams require new storage systems, buffering, delivery, and networking schemes. This work addresses many of these issues by focusing on the following: 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, and Integrated multimedia information system. Chapters in this book have been written by well-known and leading researchers in the field. The material is original and includes the most recent research results on topics such as data retrieval from disks, server architecture, buffering, synchronization, and supporting user interactions. The material has been closely edited to form a uniform and cohesive compilation. Multimedia Information Storage and Management can be used for students studying multimedia information and applications. This work will also be of special interest to researchers and developers of multimedia software and hardware systems, network protocol designers, and multimedia tool designers.

This is the latest volume in the 'Workshops in Computing' series, and contains papers from the International Workshop on Hpyermedia Design, held in Montpellier, France, from 1 - 2 June 1995. The workshop aimed to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the many facets of hypermedia design. Among the specific topics covered by the papers are: design methods, multimedia modelling, higher structures in hypermedia design spaces, user-interface design for hypermedia, building distributed web applications, and hyperdialogs. The resulting volume provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this important field. It will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and students involved in any aspect of hypermedia design.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed revised post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, NOSSDAV '95, held in Durham, New Hampshire, USA in April 1995.
The 24 full papers included were selected from a total of 101 submissions; together with overviews by the session chairpersons they reflect the state of the art in networking and operating systems support for multimedia. The papers are organized in sections on advance reservation systems, operating systems support, resource management and quality of service, audio and video systems, and scheduling and synchronization.

This book documents the scientific outcome of the International NSF-ARPA Workshop on Object Representation in Computer Vision, held in New York City in December 1994 with invited participants chosen among the recognized experts in the field.
The volume presents the complete set of papers in revised full-length versions. In addition, the first paper is a report on the workshop in which the panel discussions as well as the conclusions and recommendations reached by the workshop participants are summarized.
Altogether the volume provides an excellent, in-depth view of the state of the art in this active area of research and applications.

Following five successful workshops in the previous five years, the Rendering Workshop is now well established as a major international forum and one of the most reputable events in the field of realistic image synthesis. Including the best 31 papers which were carefully evaluated out of 68 submissions the book gives an overview on hierarchical radiosity, Monte Carlo radiosity, wavelet radiosity, nondiffuse radiosity, and radiosity performance improvements. Some papers deal with ray tracing, reconstruction techniques, volume rendering, illumination, user interface aspects, and importance sampling. Also included are two invited papers by James Arvo and Alain Fournier. As is the style of the Rendering Workshop, the contributions are mainly of algorithmic nature, often demonstrated by prototype implementations. From these implementations result numerous color images which are included as appendix. The Rendering Workshop proceedings are certainly 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.

Visualization is nowadays indispensable to get insight into the huge amounts of data pro duced by large scale simulations or advanced measurement devices. The use of com puter graphics for scientific purposes has become a well established discipline, known as Scientific Visualization. Many problems still have to be solved, and hence the field is a very active area for research and development. This book represents results of the sixth in a well established series of international workshops on Visualization in Scien tific Computing organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association in collaboration with CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia), held from May 3 to May 5,1995, in Chia, Italy. The thirteen contributions selected for this volume cover a wide range of topics, ranging from detailed algorithmic studies to searches for new metaphors. A rough di vision can be made into the parts interaction, irregular meshes, volume rendering, and applications. Interaction in three dimensions is a challenging area for research. The use of three dimensional user interfaces for more natural manipulation of three-dimensional data and their visualization is natural, but is far from trivial to realize. Pang et al. investigate the use of common objects such as spray cans and carving knives as metaphors for visualiza tion tools, in order to provide an intuitive and natural three dimensional user interface. Gibson uses a voxel-based data representation, not only for visualization, but also for physical modeling of objects. A prototype system under development for haptic explo ration is discussed."

This book is the final outcome of the Eurographics Workshop on Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, that was held in Bonas, from June 7 to 9, 1995. This workshop was the second of its kind, following the successful first edition in Italy in 1994. The goal of this ongoing series of meetings is to review the state of the art in the domain of tools, notations and methodologies supporting the design of Interactive Systems. This acknowledges the fact that making systems that are friendlier to the user makes the task ever harder to the designers of such systems, and that much research is still needed to provide the appropriate conceptual and practical tools. The workshop was located in the Chateau de Bonas, in the distant countryside of Toulouse, France. Tms location has been selected to preserve the quiet and studious atmosphere that was established in the monastery of Santa Croce at Bocca di Magra for the first edition, and that was much enjoyed by the participants. The conversations initiated during the sessions often lasted till late at night, in the peaceful atmosphere of the Gers landscape.

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: the computer, communications, and broadcasting industries. Research and development efforts in multimedia computing 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 videoconferencing systems, on-demand multimedia services, and distance learning. Multimedia Tools and Applications is one of two volumes published by Kluwer, both of which provide a broad introduction to this fast moving area. This book covers selected tools applied in multimedia systems and key multimedia applications. Topics presented include multimedia application development techniques, techniques for content-based manipulation of image databases, techniques for selection and dissemination of digital video, and tools for digital video segmentation. Selected key applications described in the book include multimedia news services, multimedia courseware and training, interactive television systems, digital video libraries, multimedia messaging systems, and interactive multimedia publishing systems. The second book, Multimedia Systems and Techniques, 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 Tools and Applications, along with its companion volume, is intended for anyone involved in multimedia system design and applications and can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on multimedia.

Interactive 3-D Graphics in Windows is a hands-on book which uses a component software approach to help Visual C++ programmers quickly and easily develop windows-integrated, interactive 3-D graphics applications. The book includes JOEY, a 3-D user interface toolkit which addresses interaction issues not dealt with in the Microsoft User Interface Style Guide. JOEY provides a 3-D user interface, 3-D tools OLE Linking and Embedding and OLE automation within the MFC framework so that the application programmer can focus on application functionality. Using this book and JOEY, an experienced Visual C++ programmer can create an interactive 3-D application in a few hours. Roy Hall and Danielle Forsyth are the founders of Crisis in Perspective, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. Crisis in Perspective develops modeling systems for architects and building professionals which facilitate modeling and animation in the same way that word processors facilitate written document design; powerful, flexible, and extensive modeling systems for people that do not yet know exactly what they want to build.

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.

The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.

COLLADA is a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an open standard Digital Asset schema for interactive 3D applications. This book explains in detail how to use the COLLADA technology in a project utilizing 3D assets, and ultimately how to create an effective content creation pipeline for the most complex development. Errata are posted at http://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/COLLADA_book.

One can observe that a wide range of human activities involves various forms of de sign. Especially if the goal implies the creation of an artifact, design is at the very center of these activities. It is the general understanding in the public to place design especially in the context of, for example, fashion, furniture, household items, cars, and architecture or in a more general way at the intersection of art and engineering. Of course, in the field of information technology, developers of software and hard ware are called system 'designers'. Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book. Summarizing these exam ples as 'creating documents', these are activities where two challenges with respect to design have to be met. Designing the content, its structure, and its relationship to the existing knowledge of potential readers is one, while the other refers to the 'rhetorical' aspects including designing the presentation of the material in order to communicate the content. Publishing is communicating knowledge."

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the DIMACS International Workshop on Graph Drawing, GD '94, held in Princeton, New Jersey in October 1994.
The 50 papers and system descriptions presented address the problem of constructing geometric representations of abstract graphs, networks and hypergraphs, with applications to key technologies such as software engineering, databases, visual interfaces, and circuit layout; they are organized in sections on three-dimensional drawings, orthogonal drawings, planar drawings, crossings, applications and systems, geometry, system demonstrations, upward drawings, proximity drawings, declarative and other approaches; in addition reports on a graph drawing contest and a poster gallery are included.

Superblack, superblock, supercase, superquadric, supersampling, superred, supergreen, and superblue are just a few of the words which make up the language of computer graphics. This new edition of a widely acclaimed dictionary provides a guide to this fast-moving subject for both relative novices and professionals working in the field. The main changes have been to add new terminology relating to virtual reality and the related topics of robotics and networked simulation. This dictionary covers the software, hardware, and applications of computer graphics and contains hundreds of terms not found elsewhere. Definitions are clear and concise, with special attention given to alternate spellings and meanings. Acronyms are decoded, and pronunciation of the seemingly unpronounceable is given, from WYSIWYG (whizzy-wig) to NAPLPS (nap-lips).

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

In this book, a variety of algoritbms are described that may be of interest to everyone who writes software for 3D-graphics. It is a book that haB been written for programmers at an intermediate level as well aB for experienced software engineers who simply want to have some particular functions at their disposal, without having to think too much about details like special cases or optimization for speed. The programming language we use is C, and that has many advantages, because it makes the code both portable and efficient. Nevertheless, it should be possible to adapt the ideas to other high-level programming languages. The reader should have a reasonable knowledge of C, because sophisticated pro grams with economical storage household and fast sections cannot be written without the use of pointers. You will find that in the long run it is just aB easy to work with pointer variables as with multiple arrays . .Ass the title of the book implies, we will not deal with algorithms that are very computation-intensive such as ray tracing or the radiosity method. Furthermore, objects will always be (closed or not closed) polyhedra, which consist of a certain number of polygons.

The purpose of this book is to present a project from the ESPRIT Specific Programme of European Research and Development in Information Technology, project number 6310, known as MMTCA: Multimedia Toolbox for Cooperative Applications. This project ran from 1992 to 1994, and concluded with a product which is probably of great usefulness to all business organisations. MMTCA enables managers to set up arrangements or to delegate tasks involving cooperation between people in different places using standard Windows software tools for what-you-see-is-what-I-see (wySIWIS) cooperation. MMTCA is the only product that delivers all of these points. Several trends in 1994 lead the authors to believe that MMTCA will become more important over the coming months: * the continuing popularity of personal computers and Microsoft's Windows operating system, * the growing importance of computer-supported cooperative work, and * the availability of powerful networks and satellites for wide-area communica tions. In MMTCA it is not necessary for the manager to know anything about com puter programming, but merely to have a user's working knowledge of the appli cation software (spreadsheets etc.) that is used in his office. The MMTCA approach envisages two stages where MMTCA's facilities are used: * by the manager: setting up or organising work to be done, * by the participants: carrying out the resulting tasks.

The tremendous development of the communication environment with local area networks and broadband ISDN has opened the way for drastic changes in network performance and has introduced new services. Within the framework of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), the goal of the ESPRIT project OSI95 (High Performance OSI Protocols with Multimedia Support on HSLANs and B-ISDN) was to design and formally specify a new transport service (and a transport protocol) able to meet the requirements of the new applications and to offer the services available at network and sub-network levels. This report gives an extended presentation of the new networking environment and the rationale for new standards, then presents the various tasks and goals of the OSI95 project.

This book constitutes the thoroughly revised proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV '93), held in Lancaster, UK in November 1993.
The 24 papers presented in the volume were carefully selected from more than 100 submissions. In addition, the book contains an introduction by the editors as well as a summary of the discussions that occurred during the workshop and a record of the panel and work-in-progress session. The book is organized into chapters on end system architecture, operating system support, high speed networking, quality of service, protocol issues, resource reservation in heterogeneous networks, and storage servers and multicast.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Advanced Teleservices and High-Speed Communication Architectures (IWACA '94), held in Heidelberg, Germany in September 1994.
The IWACA Workshop is a platform for the exchange among researchers and developers from both the multimedia applications and the high-speed telecommunication communities. The book presents revised versions of the 36 papers accepted for presentation at the workshop. They cover several aspects of multimedia applications and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and focus on ATM-LANs and ATM for the wide area high-performance network of the future.