Multimedia Content Analysis: Theory and Applications covers the latest in multimedia content analysis and applications based on such analysis. As research has progressed, it has become clear that this field has to appeal to other disciplines such as psycho-physics, media production, etc. This book consists of invited chapters that cover the entire range of the field. Some of the topics covered include low-level audio-visual analysis based retrieval and indexing techniques, the TRECVID effort, video browsing interfaces, content creation and content analysis, and multimedia analysis-based applications, among others. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the multimedia field.

This book is designed to cover the basics of C++, the powerful programming language used by developers all over the world. Its readily understandable concepts and easy syntax are used in video games, embedded systems, IoT devices, and resource-heavy AI applications. Using a "self-teaching" method with numerous examples and figures, the book covers all of the major C++ concepts, including pointers, classes, strings, arrays, polymorphism, inheritance, file handling, and more. Various types of the end of chapter exercises include theoretical, practical, and multiple choice (with answers) to enhance comprehension of the topics covered.

Social media is now ubiquitous on the internet, generating both new possibilities and new challenges in information analysis and retrieval.

This comprehensive text/reference examines in depth the synergy between multimedia content analysis, personalization, and next-generation networking. The book demonstrates how this integration can result in robust, personalized services that provide users with an improved multimedia-centric quality of experience. Each chapter offers a practical step-by-step walkthrough for a variety of concepts, components and technologies relating to the development of applications and services.

Topics and features: provides contributions from an international and interdisciplinary selection of experts in their fields; introduces the fundamentals of social media retrieval, presenting the most important areas of research in this domain; examines the important topic of multimedia tagging in social environments, including geo-tagging; discusses issues of personalization and privacy in social media; reviews advances in encoding, compression and network architectures for the exchange of social media information; describes a range of applications related to social media.

Researchers and students interested in social media retrieval will find this book a valuable resource, covering a broad overview of state-of-the-art research and emerging trends in this area. The text will also be of use to practicing engineers involved in envisioning and building innovative social media applications and services.

Many emerging technologies such as video conferencing, video-on-demand, and digital libraries require the efficient delivery of compressed video streams. For applications that require the delivery of compressed stored multimedia streams, the a priori knowledge available about these compressed streams can aid in the allocation of server and network resources. By using a client-side buffer, the resource requirements from the server and network can be minimized. Buffering Techniques for Delivery of Compressed Video in Video-on-Demand Systems presents a comprehensive description of buffering techniques for the delivery of compressed, prerecorded multimedia data. While these techniques can be applied to any compressed data streams, this book focusses primarily on the delivery of video streams because of the large resource requirements that they can consume. The book first describes buffering techniques for the continuous playback of stored video sources. In particular, several bandwidth smoothing (or buffering) algorithms that are provably optimal under certain conditions are presented. To provide a well-rounded discussion, the book then describes extensions that aid in the ability to provide interactive delivery of video across networks. Specifically, reservation techniques that take into account interactive functions such as fast-forward and rewind are described. In addition, extensions to the bandwidth smoothing algorithms presented in the first few chapters are described. These algorithms are designed with interactive, continuous playback of stored video in mind and are also provably optimal under certain constraints. Buffering Techniques for Delivery of Compressed Video in Video-on-Demand Systems serves as an excellent resource for multimedia systems, networking and video-on-demand designers, and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

We are extremely pleased to present a comprehensive book comprising a collection of research papers which is basically an outcome of the Second IFIP TC 13.6 Working Group conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID2009. The conference was held in Pune, India during October 7-8, 2009. It was hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India, and jointly organized with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark; and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. The theme of HWID2009 was Usability in Social, C- tural and Organizational Contexts. The conference was held under the auspices of IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. 1 Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction The committees under IFIP include the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction within which the work of this volume has been conducted. TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction has as its aim to encourage theoretical and empirical human science research to promote the design and evaluation of human-oriented ICT. Within TC13 there are different working groups concerned with different aspects of human- computer interaction. The flagship event of TC13 is the bi-annual international conference called INTERACT at which both invited and contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the rejection rate is high.

Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieval for Audiovisual Data Parsing is an up-to-date overview of audio and video content analysis. Included is extensive treatment of audiovisual data segmentation, indexing and retrieval based on multimodal media content analysis, and content-based management of audio data. In addition to the commonly studied audio types such as speech and music, the authors have included hybrid types of sounds that contain more than one kind of audio component such as speech or environmental sound with music in the background. Emphasis is also placed on semantic-level identification and classification of environmental sounds. The authors introduce a new generic audio retrieval system on top of the audio archiving schemes. Both theoretical analysis and implementation issues are presented. The developing MPEG-7 standards are explored. Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieval for Audiovisual Data Parsing will be especially useful to researchers and graduate level students designing and developing fully functional audiovisual systems for audio/video content parsing of multimedia streams.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (IIMSS-2011). IIMSS-2011 comes as a sequel to IIMSS-2008 (Piraeus-Athens, Greece, July 9, 10 and 11, 2008), IIMSS-2009 (Mogliano Veneto (near Venice), Italy, July 15, 16 and 17, 2009) and IIMSS-2010 (Baltimore, USA, July 28, 29, and 30, 2010). This fourth edition of the IIMSS Conference was organized jointly by the Department of Informatics of the University of Piraeus, Greece and the School of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of South Australia, in conjunction with KES International. At a time when computers are more widespread than ever and computer users range from highly qualified scientists to non-computer-expert professionals and may include people with special needs, interactivity, personalization and adaptivity have become a necessity in modern multimedia systems. Modern intelligent multimedia systems need to be interactive not only through classical modes of interaction where the user inputs information through a keyboard or mouse. They must also support other modes of interaction, such as visual or lingual computer-user interfaces, which render them more attractive, user friendlier, more human-like and more informative. IIMSS is a new series of international scientific conferences aimed at presenting novel research in the fields of intelligent multimedia systems relevant to the development of a new generation of interactive, user-centric services.

Several works on multimedia storage appear in literature today, but very little if any, have been devoted to handling long duration video retrieval, over large scale networks. Distributed retrieval of multimedia documents, especially the long duration documents, is an imperative step in rendering high-quality, high-fidelity, and cost-effective services for network service providers.

Distributed Multimedia Retrieval Strategies for Large Scale Networked Systems presents an up-to-date research status in the domain of distributed video retrieval. This professional book will include several different techniques that are in place for long duration video retrieval. An experimentally tested technology under the JINI platform, demonstrates a practical working system which serves as a feasibility study, as well as the first step in realizing such a technology.

This monograph book is focused on the recent advances in smart, multimedia and computer gaming technologies. The Contributions include: *Smart Gamification and Smart Serious Games. *Fusion of secure IPsec-based Virtual Private Network, mobile computing and rich multimedia technology. *Teaching and Promoting Smart Internet of Things Solutions Using the Serious-game Approach. *Evaluation of Student Knowledge using an e-Learning Framework. *The iTEC Eduteka. *3D Virtual Worlds as a Fusion of Immersing, Visualizing, Recording, and Replaying Technologies. *Fusion of multimedia and mobile technology in audio guides for Museums and Exhibitions: from Bluetooth Push to Web Pull. The book is directed to researchers, students and software developers working in the areas of education and information technologies.

"All problems in computer graphics can be solved with a matrix inversion." Jim Blinn
Jim Blinn is Back
Dirty Pixels is Jim's second compendium of articles selected from his award-winning column, "Jim Blinn's Corner," in "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications." Here he addresses topics in image processing and pixel arithmetic and shares the tricks he's uncovered through years of experimentation.
Writing in the inimitable, engaging style for which he's famous, Jim's easy-to-understadn explanations and solutions make abstract concepts accessible to a broad audience. Dirty Pixels is an invaluable resource for anyone in the computer graphics field.
Teapots and More
Jim's contributions to computer graphics include the Voyager Fly-by animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; "The Mechanical Universe," a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series "Cosmos." Jim developed many graphics techniques now in widespread use, among them bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling."

Cross-Media Service Delivery is of interest to professionals and academicians working in content authoring and electronic publishing platforms; as well as in media and broadcasting.
The digitization of traditional media formats, such as text, images, video, and sound provides us with the ability to store, process, and transport content in a uniform way. This has led the formerly distinct industries of media, telecommunications, and information technology to converge. Cross-media publishing and service delivery are important new trends emerging in the content industry landscape. Mass-media organizations and content providers transitionally targeted content production towards a single delivery channel. However, recent economic and technological changes in the industry led content providers to extend their brands to cover multiple delivery channels. Following the content industry trend to "create once and publish everywhere" - COPE, a number of architectures, technologies, and tools are currently being developed and deployed to facilitate the automatic conversion of content to multiple formats, and the creation of innovative multi-platform services. This new approach enables the seamless access to information over different network infrastructures and client platforms.
This work uniquely brings together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The contributions are organized into four different areas: the business issues driving the requirements for cross media content delivery, the architectures used for delivering content to multiple platforms, technologies that address specificpractical problems, and, last but not least, concrete applications.

The short history of the International Working Conference on Educating Professionals for Network Centric Organizations is a good illustration of the tremendous rate of development of global networking, its impact and of its deep penetration into management of business, industty and administration. In 1996, when the theme and name of the conference had been set, there was yet no heavy use of networks in the fields just mentioned. However, it has been already established well enough to enable those with a visionary sense to feel that it will be an important subject and it could be an interesting theme for a conference to be held within two years. It seemed a risky decision at the time but it turned out to be very successful when conducted in 1998. It has been stated that "it took until 1997 for the business world to discover the Internet." In less than two years, the Internet and the Intranets are a vital component for running major parts of the business world. This fast pace puts some pressure on writing papers and holding a conferenc- effort has to be made to have meaningful contents despite the changes. A time span of 9 months between writing a paper and having it published, seemed once to be very short, but it is not so any more when referring to a dynamic issue like global networking.

Design is an art form in which the designer selects from a myriad of alternatives to bring an "optimum" choice to a user. In many complex of "optimum" is difficult to define. Indeed, the users systems the notion themselves will not agree, so the "best" system is simply the one in which the designer and the user have a congruent viewpoint. Compounding the design problem are tradeoffs that span a variety of technologies and user requirements. The electronic business system is a classically complex system whose tradeoff criteria and user views are constantly changing with rapidly developing underlying technology. Professor Milutinovic has chosen this area for his capstone contribution to the computer systems design. This book completes his trilogy on design issue in computer systems. His first work, "Surviving the Design of a 200 MHz RISC Microprocessor" (1997) focused on the tradeoffs and design issues within a processor. His second work, "Surviving the Design of Microprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems" (2000) considers the design issues involved with assembling a number of processors into a coherent system. Finally, this book generalizes the system design problem to electronic commerce on the Internet, a global system of immense consequence.

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed unprecedented innovations in the development of miniaturized electromechanical devices and low-power wireless communication making practical the embedding of networked computational devices into a rapidly widening range of material entities.
This trend has enabled the coupling of physical objects and digital information into cyber-physical systems and it is widely expected to revolutionize the way resource computational consumption and provision will occur. Specifically, one of the core ingredients of this vision, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), demands the provision of networked services to support interaction between conventional IT systems with both physical and artificial objects. In this way, IoT is seen as a combination of several emerging technologies, which enables the transformation of everyday objects into smart objects. It is also perceived as a paradigm that connects real world with digital world.
The focus of this book is exactly on the novel collective and computational intelligence technologies that will be required to achieve this goal. While, one of the aims of this book is to discuss the progress made, it also prompts future directions on the utilization of inter-operable and cooperative next generation computational technologies, which supports the IoT approach, that being an advanced functioning towards an integrated collective intelligence approach for the benefit of various organizational settings.

As interactive application software such as apps, installations, and multimedia presentations have become pervasive in everyday life, more and more computer scientists, engineers, and technology experts acknowledge the influence that exists beyond visual explanations. Computational Solutions for Knowledge, Art, and Entertainment: Information Exchange Beyond d104 focuses on the methods of depicting knowledge-based concepts in order to assert power beyond a visual explanation of scientific and computational notions. This book combines formal descriptions with graphical presentations and encourages readers to interact by creating visual solutions for science-related concepts and presenting data. This reference is essential for researchers, computer scientists, and academics focusing on the integration of science, technology, computing, art, and mathematics for visual problem solving.

1.1 Was ist Typographie?.- 1.2 Typographie als Handwerk.- 1.3 Die Schrift.- Schrift.- 2.1 Das Schriftzeichen.- 2.2 Zeichenmasse.- 2.3 Serifen.- 2.4 Das einzelne Zeichen (die Letter).- 2.5 Schrifteneinteilung.- 2.6 Schriftnamen innerhalb einer Schnittfamilie.- 2.7 Spezialzeichen und Spezialschnitte.- 2.8 Laufweiten, Zeichenabstande.- 2.8.1 Unterschneiden.- 2.8.2 Ligaturen.- 2.9 Schriftauszeichnung.- 2.10 Wortabstande.- 2.11 Zeilenabstand und Durchschuss.- 2.12 Satzausrichtung.- 2.13 Initialen.- 2.14 Formsatz.- Massangaben in der Typographie.- 3.1 Typographische Masseinheiten.- 3.1.1 Kegel- und Versalhoehen.- 3.1.2 Massangaben im DTP.- 3.1.3 Weitere typographische Masse.- Der Satzspiegel.- 4.1 Proportionen der Seite.- 4.2 Festlegen des Satzspiegels.- 4.2.1 Stege beim Satzspiegel.- 4.2.2 Gestaltungsraster.- 4.3 Stilelemente im Satzspiegel.- 4.3.1 Schriftgroessen.- 4.3.2 Absatzuntergliederung.- 4.3.3 Grauwert einer Seite.- 4.3.4 Fussnoten und Marginalien.- 4.4 Feinkorrekturen.- 4.4.1 Absatzumbruch.- 4.4.2 Worttrennungen.- 4.4.3 AEsthetikprogramme.- Die Schrift zum Text.- 5.1 Aussage einer Schrift.- 5.2 Werkschriften.- 5.3 UEberschriften / Headlines.- 5.4 Welche Schrift zu welchem Zweck?.- 5.5 Mischen von Schriften.- 5.6 Ausnahmen.- Schreibregeln.- 6.1 Zahlensatz.- 6.2 Absatz-Numerierung.- 6.3 Abkurzungen.- 6.4 Unterschiedliche Anfuhrungszeichen.- 6.5 Zwischenraume.- 6.6 Verschiedene Textstriche.- Tabellensatz.- 7.1 Reihensatz oder Tabelle.- 7.2 Tabellenkomponenten.- 7.3 Tabellenkonzeption.- 7.4 Tabellengliederung.- 7.5 Besondere Situationen.- 7.6 Diagramm statt Tabelle.- 7.7 Tabelle statt Liste.- Abbildungen.- 8.1 Anordnung von Abbildungen.- 8.2 Linienstarken.- 8.3 Geeigneter Detaillierungsgrad.- 8.4 Schrift in Abbildungen.- 8.5 Randbeschnitt.- 8.6 Halbtonbilder und Raster.- 8.6.1 Rasterzerlegung.- 8.6.2 Bildqualitat in Farbtiefe.- 8.6.3 Technische Raster.- 8.6.4 Tonwertzuwachs.- 8.7 Komprimieren - aber richtig.- 8.8 Farbe in Dokumenten.- 8.8.1 Der Einsatz von Farben.- 8.8.2 Stimmung und Wirkung von Farben.- 8.8.3 Farben im Farbkreis.- 8.8.4 Farbharmonie.- 8.8.5 Farben in Diagrammen und Graphiken.- 8.8.6 Farben an das Ausgabemedium adaptieren.- Von Zahlen zu Diagrammen.- 9.1 Verschiedene Diagrammarten.- 9.1.1 Kreisdiagramme.- 9.1.2 Balkendiagramme.- 9.1.3 Stabdiagramme.- 9.1.4 Figurendiagramme.- 9.1.5 Liniendiagramme.- 9.1.6 Netzdiagramme.- 9.2 Dreidimensionale Diagramme.- 9.3 Skalen.- 9.4 Weitere Regeln bei Diagrammen.- Prasentationen.- 10.1 Voruberlegungen zu Prasentationen.- 10.2 Von der Information zur Prasentation.- 10.3 Prasentationsmedien.- 10.4 Gliederung der Folien.- 10.5 Schrift in Folien.- 10.6 Makro- und Mikrotypographic in Prasentationen.- 10.6.1 Typo-Orthographie - Schreibregeln.- 10.6.2 Eine sorgfaltige Vorlage ist die halbe Arbeit.- 10.7 Graphiken in Folien.- 10.7.1 Bilder als symbolischer Hintergrund.- 10.7.2 Funktionsgraphiken.- 10.7.3 Weitere Prinzipien bei Graphiken.- 10.8 UEberblendeffekte und Animationen.- 10.9 Weitere Tips fur Prasentationen.- Der Standardbrief.- 11.1 DIN-Brief.- 11.2 Umschlage und Falzarten.- Von der Seite zum Buch.- 12.1 Arbeitsablauf einer Publikation.- 12.2 Die Teile eines Buchs.- 12.3 Titelei.- 12.3.1 Der Schmutztitel.- 12.3.2 Der Haupttitel.- 12.3.3 Impressum.- 12.3.4 Inhaltsverzeichnis.- 12.3.5 Vor- oder Geleitwort.- 12.4 Anhang.- 12.4.1 Bibliographie.- 12.4.2 Glossar.- 12.4.3 Register.- 12.5 Einband.- Satz und Korrektur.- 13.1 Satzanweisungen.- 13.2 Korrekturen, Korrekturzeichen.- Das Belichten.- 14.1 Die Belichtung.- 14.2 PostScript, PDF oder Dokument?.- 14.2.1 PostScript-Dateien.- 14.2.2 Adobe Acrobat - PDF.- 14.2.3 Dokumenten-Dateien.- 14.3 Schriften beim Belichten.- 14.4 Graphiken und Bilder.- 14.5 Angaben zum Belichten.- 14.6 Raster beim Belichten.- 14.7 Belichten von Farben.- 14.8 Belichtungsformular.- 14.9 Proof - Probedruck.- Drucken und Binden.- 15.1 Verschiedene Druckverfahren.- 15.2 Druck-Vorbereitungen.- 15.2.1 Belichten des Films.- 15.2.2 Ausschiessen.-

A comprehensive, systematic approach to multimedia database management systems. It presents methods for managing the increasing demands of multimedia databases and their inherent design and architecture issues, and covers how to create an effective multimedia database by integrating the various information indexing and retrieval methods available. It also addresses how to measure multimedia database performance that is based on similarity to queries and routinely affected by human judgement. The book concludes with a discussion of networking and operating system support for multimedia databases and a look at research and development in this dynamic field.

Streaming Media Architectures, Techniques, and Applications: Recent Advances spans a number of interdependent and emerging topics in streaming media. Streaming media is inherently a cross-disciplinary subject that involves information theory, signal processing, communication and networking etc. Coding and transmission definitely lie in the core position in streaming media, and these research topics have been extremely active in recent years. This book is a comprehensive collection of topics including media coding, wireless/mobile video, P2P media streaming, and applications of streaming media.

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.

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 volume presents a series of carefully selected papers on the theme of Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (IIMSS-18), but also including contributions on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (InMed-18) and Smart Transportation Systems (STS-18). The papers were presented at the Smart Digital Futures 2018 multi-theme conference, which grouped the AMSTA, IDT, InMed, SEEL, STS and IIMSS conferences in one venue in Gold Coast, Australia in June 2018. IIMSS-18 included sessions on 'Cognitive Systems and Big Data Analytics', 'Data Processing and Secure Systems', 'Innovative Information Services for Advanced Knowledge Activity', 'Autonomous System' and ' Image Processing'. InMed-18 papers cover major areas of 'Digital Architecture for Internet of Things, Big data, Cloud and Mobile IT in Healthcare' and 'Advanced ICT for Medical and Healthcare'. STS-18 papers provide a comprehensive overview of various aspects of current research into intelligent transportation technology.

Mass customization is an emerging paradigm that is gathering a growing interest in many different industrial fields. The EUROShoE project, financed by the European Commission, explored the applicability of and developed technologies for the adoption of such a paradigm in the footwear business. The three-year research made evident the benefits that shoe companies can obtain by switching to the new business models and contributed to the development of many of the enabling technologies that adopting the new paradigm appears to have. Mass Customization and Footwear: Myth, Salvation or Reality is the only monograph dedicated to the application of mass customization in a particular industry. Based on the outcomes of the EUROShoE project, the book is a detailed analysis of the most relevant case studies of early mass customizers in the footwear sector, highlighting reasons for their failure or success. Both the technological aspects and the business aspects of mass customization, together with some relevant economic indicators are covered in the book. By showing examples of how a mature manufacturing sector like shoe making can be thoroughly renovated in business and mentality by applying this paradigm; Mass Customization and Footwear: Myth, Salvation or Reality will interest both practitioners in the footwear sector and postgraduates, researchers and lecturers in the area of mass customization.

For almost three decades eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager Fly-by animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; "The Mechanical Universe," a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series "Cosmos." In addition, Blinn, the recipient of the first SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling.
Blinn shares his insight and experience in "Jim Blinn's Corner," an award-winning column in the technical magazine "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications" in which he unveils his most useful graphics methods and observations. This book, a compendium of 20 of the column's articles, leads you through the "graphics pipeline" offering a wealth of tips and tricks. It explores common graphics problems, many of which have never before been addressed.
An invaluable resource for any graphics professional
In his entertaining and inspirational style, Blinn examines a variety of topics to help computer graphics software and application developers recognize and solve graphics programming problems. Focusing on geometry and the graphics pipeline, he shares:
easy to understand explanations of difficult concepts gleaned from years of teaching
interesting examples of tricky special cases that cause conventional algorithms to fail
highly refined algorithms for clipping, viewing, lighting, and rendering
easy to understand explanations of difficult concepts gleaned from years of teaching
interesting examples of tricky special cases that cause conventional algorithms to fail
highly refined algorithms for clipping, viewing, lighting, and rendering

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."