This book answers a question which came about while the author was work ing on his diploma thesis [1]: would it be better to ask for the available band width instead of probing the network (like TCP does)? The diploma thesis was concerned with long-distance musical interaction ("NetMusic"). This is a very peculiar application: only a small amount of bandwidth may be necessary, but timely delivery and reduced loss are very important. Back then, these require ments led to a thorough investigation of existing telecommunication network mechanisms, but a satisfactory answer to the question could not be found. Simply put, the answer is "yes" - this work describes a mechanism which indeed enables an application to "ask for the available bandwidth". This obvi ously does not only concern online musical collaboration any longer. Among others, the mechanism yields the following advantages over existing alterna tives: * good throughput while maintaining close to zero loss and a small bottleneck queue length * usefulness for streaming media applications due to a very smooth rate * feasibility for satellite and wireless links * high scalability Additionally, a reusable framework for future applications that need to "ask the network" for certain performance data was developed.

Exploration of Visual Data presents latest research efforts in the area of content-based exploration of image and video data. The main objective is to bridge the semantic gap between high-level concepts in the human mind and low-level features extractable by the machines. The two key issues emphasized are "content-awareness" and "user-in-the-loop". The authors provide a comprehensive review on algorithms for visual feature extraction based on color, texture, shape, and structure, and techniques for incorporating such information to aid browsing, exploration, search, and streaming of image and video data. They also discuss issues related to the mixed use of textual and low-level visual features to facilitate more effective access of multimedia data. Exploration of Visual Data provides state-of-the-art materials on the topics of content-based description of visual data, content-based low-bitrate video streaming, and latest asymmetric and nonlinear relevance feedback algorithms, which to date are unpublished.

Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies addresses issues in scheduling and management of resources in an interactive continuous-media (e.g., audio and video) server. The book emphasizes dynamic and run-time strategies for resource scheduling and management. Such strategies provide effective tools for supporting interactivity with on-line users who require the system to be responsive in serving their requests, and whose needs and actions vary frequently over time. With an emphasis on responsiveness and transient performance, this book elaborates on dynamic strategies for managing and scheduling resources in Video-on-Demand/Multimedia systems. Unlike previous books, this volume presents an unprecedented detailed analysis of the start-up and departure of streams. It gives a comprehensive evaluation of various techniques as workloads are varied in multiple dimensions (including arrival rate, data rate and length of play). Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies collectively addresses multiple issues including QoS, throughput, responsiveness and efficiency. The solutions discussed in this volume are particularly valuable to practitioners who are building digital library, interactive multimedia and hypermedia servers. Interactive Video-on-Demand Systems: Resource Management and Scheduling Strategies is an excellent reference for researchers, practitioners and educators in the field of multimedia systems, and may be used for advanced courses on multimedia systems and Video-on-Demand servers.

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 analyz ing image sequences, or video understanding. Video understanding deals with understanding of video sequences, e. g. , recognition of gestures, activities, fa cial 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 obvious overlap with computer vision. The main goal of computer graphics is to gener ate and animate realistic looking images, and videos. Researchers in computer graphics are increasingly employing techniques from computer vision to gener ate the synthetic imagery. A good example of this is image-based rendering and modeling techniques, in which geometry, appearance, and lighting is de rived from real images using computer vision techniques. Here the shift is from synthesis to analysis followed by synthesis.

Multi-Frame Motion-Compensated Prediction for Video Transmission presents a comprehensive description of a new technique in video coding and transmission. The work presented in the book has had a very strong impact on video coding standards and will be of interest to practicing engineers and researchers as well as academics. The multi-frame technique and the Lagrangian coder control have been adopted by the ITU-T as an integral part of the well known H.263 standard and are were adopted in the ongoing H.26L project of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group. This work will interest researchers and students in the field of video coding and transmission. Moreover, engineers in the field will also be interested since an integral part of the well known H.263 standard is based on the presented material.

Due to the great success and enormous impact of IP networks, In ternet access (such as sending and receiving e-mails) and web brows ing have become the ruling paradigm for next generation wireless systems. On the other hand, great technological and commercial success of services and applications is being witnessed in mobile wire less communications with examples of cellular, pes voice telephony and wireless LANs. The service paradigm has thus shifted from the conventional voice service to seamlessly integrated high quality mul timedia transmission over broadband wireless mobile networks. The multimedia content may include data, voice, audio, image, video and so on. With availability of more powerful portable devices, such as PDA, portable computer and cellular phone, coupled with the easier access to the core network (using a mobile device), the number of mobile users and the demand for multimedia-based applications is increasing rapidly. As a result, there is an urgent need for a sys tem that supports heterogeneous multimedia services and provides seamless access to the desired resources via wireless connections. Therefore, the convergence of multimedia communication and wireless mobile networking technologies into the next generation wireless multimedia (WMM) networks with the vision of "anytime, anywhere, anyform" information system is the certain trend in the foreseeable future. However, successful combination of these two technologies presents many challenges such as available spectral bandwidth, energy efficiency, seamless end-to-end communication, robustness, security, etc.

Adaptive 3D Sound Systems focuses on creating multiple virtual sound sources in 3D reverberant spaces using adaptive filters. Adaptive algorithms are introduced and explained, including the multiple-error filtered-x algorithm and the adjoint LMS algorithm. The book covers the physical, psychoacoustical, and signal processing aspects of adaptive and non-adaptive 3D sound systems. Included is an introduction to spatial hearing, sound localization and reverberation, frequency selectivity of the human auditory system, the state of the art in HRTF-based 3D sound systems, binaural synthesis, and loudspeaker displays. The adaptive approach to HRTF-based 3D sound systems is examined in detail for the general case of creating multiple virtual sound sources at the ears of multiple listeners in a reverberant 3D space. The derived solution can be applied to other applications, such as cross-talk cancellation, loudspeakers and room equalization, concert hall simulation, and active sound control. Several solutions for the problem of moving listeners are introduced. Strategies for enlarging the zones of equalization around the listeners' ears, correct loudspeakers positioning, and using multiresolution filters are proposed. Fast multiresolution spectral analysis using non-uniform sampling is developed for implementation of multiresolution filters. The well-focused topics, along with implementation details for adaptive algorithms, make Adaptive 3D Sound Systems suitable for multimedia applications programmers, advanced level students, and researchers in audio and signal processing.

Multimedia Mining: A Highway to Intelligent Multimedia Documents brings together experts in digital media content analysis, state-of-art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, knowledge engineers and domain experts from diverse applied disciplines. Multimedia documents are ubiquitous and often required, if not essential, in many applications today. This phenomenon has made multimedia documents widespread and extremely large. There are tools for managing and searching within these collections, but the need for tools to extract hidden useful knowledge embedded within multimedia objects is becoming pressing and central for many decision-making applications. The tools needed today are tools for discovering relationships between objects or segments within multimedia document components, such as classifying images based on their content, extracting patterns in sound, categorizing speech and music, and recognizing and tracking objects in video streams.

ATM is regarded as the next high speed multimedia networking paradigm. Mobile computing, which is a confluence of mobile communications, computing and networks, is changing the way people work. Wireless ATM combines wireless and ATM technologies to provide mobility support and multimedia services to mobile users. Wireless ATM and Ad-Hoc Networks: Protocols and Architectures, a consolidated reference work, presents the state of the art in wireless ATM technology. It encompasses the protocol and architectural aspects of Wireless ATM networks. The topics covered in this book include: mobile communications and computing, fundamentals of ATM and Wireless ATM, mobile routing and switch discovery, handover protocol design and implementation, mobile quality of service, unifying handover strategy for both unicast and multicast mobile connections, and roaming between Wireless ATM LANs. A novel routing protocol for ad-hoc mobile networks (also known as Cambridge Ad-hoc) is also presented in this book along with information about ETSI HIPERLAN, the RACE Mobile Broadband System, and SUPERNET. This timely book is a valuable reference source for researchers, scientists, consultants, engineers, professors and graduate students working in this new and exciting field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2012, San Sebastian, Spain, November 2012. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and aesthetics; authoring tools and applications; evaluation and user experience reports; virtual characters and agents; new storytelling modes; workshops.

In the early 1990s, the establishment of the Internet brought forth a revolutionary viewpoint of information storage, distribution, and processing: the World Wide Web is becoming an enormous and expanding distributed digital library. Along with the development of the Web, image indexing and retrieval have grown into research areas sharing a vision of intelligent agents. Far beyond Web searching, image indexing and retrieval can potentially be applied to many other areas, including biomedicine, space science, biometric identification, digital libraries, the military, education, commerce, culture and entertainment. Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling Approaches to Image Retrieval describes several approaches of integrating machine learning and statistical modeling into an image retrieval and indexing system that demonstrates promising results. The topics of this book reflect authors' experiences of machine learning and statistical modeling based image indexing and retrieval. This book contains detailed references for further reading and research in this field as well.

Multimedia has two fundamental characteristics that can be expressed by the following formula: Multimedia = Multiple Media + Hypermedia. How can software engineering take advantage of these two characteristics? Will these two characteristics pose problems in multimedia systems design? These are some of the issues to be explored in this book. The first two chapters will be of interest to managers, software engineers, programmers, and people interested in gaining an overall understanding of multimedia software engineering. The next six chapters present multimedia software engineering according to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One. This is of particular use to practitioners, system developers, multimedia application designers, programmers, and people interested in prototyping multimedia applications. The next three chapters are more research-oriented and are mainly intended for researchers working on the specification, modeling, and analysis of distributed multimedia systems, but will also be relevant to scientists, researchers, and software engineers interested in the systems and theoretical aspects of multimedia software engineering. Multimedia Software Engineering can be used as a textbook in a graduate course on multimedia software engineering or in an undergraduate course on software design where the emphasis is on multimedia applications. It is especially suitable for a project-oriented course.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Forum on Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communication, IFTC 2012, Shanghai, China, November. The 69 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image processing and pattern recognition; image and video analysis; image quality assessment; text image and speech processing; content retrieval and security; source coding; multimedia communication; new advances in broadband multimedia; human computer interface; 3D video.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Symposium on Communicability, Computer Graphics and Innovative Design for Interactive Systems, held in Cordoba, Spain, in June 2011. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. They examine latest breakthroughs and future trends within the communicability, computer graphics, and innovative design of interactive systems.

This book contains papers invited after the First International Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing, MSSP 2010, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2010. The 9 revised papers included in this volume represent the diversity of two fields of research, Mobile HCI and Social Signal Processing and areas of overlap. They cover a wide range of topics spanning from approaches for effective interaction with mobile and wearable devices to modelling, analysis and synthesis of nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions.

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.

Information Organization and Databases: Foundations of Data Organization provides recent developments of information organization technologies that have become crucial not only for data mining applications and information visualization, but also for treatment of semistructured data, spatio-temporal data and multimedia data that are not necessarily stored in conventional DBMSs. Information Organization and Databases: Foundations of Data Organization presents: semistructured data addressing XML, query languages and integrity constraints, focusing on advanced technologies for organizing web data for effective retrieval; multimedia database organization emphasizing video data organization and data structures for similarity retrieval; technologies for data mining and data warehousing; index organization and efficient query processing issues; spatial data access and indexing; organizing and retrieval of WWW and hypermedia. Information Organization and Databases: Foundations of Data Organization is a resource for database practitioners, database researchers, designers and administrators of multimedia information systems, and graduate-level students in the area of information retrieval and/or databases wishing to keep abreast of advances in the information organization technologies.

Analyzing Video Sequences of Multiple Humans: Tracking, Posture Estimation and Behavior Recognition describes some computer vision-based methods that analyze video sequences of humans. More specifically, methods for tracking multiple humans in a scene, estimating postures of a human body in 3D in real-time, and recognizing a person's behavior (gestures or activities) are discussed. For the tracking algorithm, the authors developed a non-synchronous method that tracks multiple persons by exploiting a Kalman filter that is applied to multiple video sequences. For estimating postures, an algorithm is presented that locates the significant points which determine postures of a human body, in 3D in real-time. Human activities are recognized from a video sequence by the HMM (Hidden Markov Models)-based method that the authors pioneered. The effectiveness of the three methods is shown by experimental results.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, PCM 2013, held in Nanjing, China, in December 2013. The 30 revised full papers and 27 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the area of multimedia content analysis, multimedia signal processing and communications and multimedia applications and services.

This second volume of the "Handbook of Digital Homecare" reviews the attempts to develop new ICT services for digital homecare, i.e. services to deliver, maintain and improve care in the home environment using the latest ICT technology and devices. The book highlights the successful projects as well as failures of Digital homecare and provides several "lessons learned" to the wide audience of Health and ICT professionals.

The papers in this volume were presented at the Second Annual Work shop on Active Middleware Services and were selected for inclusion here by the Editors. The AMS workshop was organized with support from both the National Science Foundation and the CAT center at the Uni versity of Arizona, and was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 2000, in conjunction with the 9th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-9). The explosive growth of Internet-based applications and the prolifer ation of networking technologies has been transforming most areas of computer science and engineering as well as computational science and commercial application areas. This opens an outstanding opportunity to explore new, Internet-oriented software technologies that will open new research and application opportunities not only for the multimedia and commercial world, but also for the scientific and high-performance computing applications community. Two emerging technologies - agents and active networks - allow increased programmability to enable bring ing new services to Internet based applications. The AMS workshop presented research results and working papers in the areas of active net works, mobile and intelligent agents, software tools for high performance distributed computing, network operating systems, and application pro gramming models and environments. The success of an endeavor such as this depends on the contributions of many individuals. We would like to thank Dr. Frederica Darema and the NSF for sponsoring the workshop.

This undergraduate-level computer graphics text provides the reader with conceptual and practical insights into how to approach building a majority of the interactive graphics applications they encounter daily. As each topic is introduced, students are guided in developing a software library that will support fast prototyping of moderately complex applications using a variety of APIs, including OpenGL and DirectX.

With the tragic airline disaster in New York City, on September 11th, 2001, the subject of emergency communications has become very important. Preferential Emergency Communications: From Telecommunications to the Internet is intended to provide an in-depth exposure to authorized emergency communications. These communications generally involve preferential treatment of signaling and/or data to help ensure forwarding of information through a network. This book covers examples ranging from private networks to current investigations using Next Generation Networks (i.e., IP based communications). The information acts as a reference for network designers, network vendors, and users of authorized emergency communications services.
Preferential Emergency Communications: From Telecommunications to the Internet, a professional monograph, is divided into three sections. The first describes systems and protocols that have been deployed as private networks for use by government agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense. This section also presents an in-depth discussion on MLPP. We then present current work in the area of Land Mobile Radio, commonly used by local emergency personnel such as police and fireman. This second section also describes systems that have been deployed over the public switched telephone network. Finally, the third section presents insights on trying to support emergency communications over TCP/IP networks and the Internet. In this last item we look into what IETF protocols can be considered candidates for change, as well as those protocols and applications that should not be altered.
Preferential Emergency Communications: From Telecommunications to the Internet is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. This book is also suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

To operate future generation multimedia communications systems high data rate transmission needs to be guaranteed with a high quality of service. For instance, the third generation cellular mobile systems should offer a high data rate up to 2 Mbit/s for video, audio, speech and data transmission. The important challenge for these cellular systems will be the choice of an appropriate multiple access scheme. The advantages of the spread spectrum technique are: High immunity against multipath distortion, no need for frequency planning, high flexibility and easier variable rate transmission etc. On the other hand, the technique of multi-carrier transmission has recently been receiving wide interest for high data rate applications. The advantages of multi-carrier transmission are the robustness in the case of frequency selective fading channels, in particular the reduced signal processing complexity by equalization in the frequency domain, and in the capability of narrow-band interference rejection.The advantages and success of multi-carrier (MC) modulation and the spread spectrum (SS) technique has led to the combination of MCM with SS, known as multi-carrier spread-spectrum (MC-SS) for cellular systems. This combination, benefits from the advantages of both schemes: Higher flexibility, higher spectral efficiency, simpler detection techniques, narrow band interference rejection capability, etc. Multicarrier-Spread-Spectrum comprises a collection of papers which collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging multiple access scheme. It will be a valuable reference for all researchers and practitioners working on the area of wireless communications and networking.

This book presents reports from the forefront of soft computing in the Internet industry and covers important topics in the field such as search engines, fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems as well as e-business and e-commerce.