The digitisation 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 traditionally 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 aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary core of contributors to address the technical and business issues of cross-media publishing and service delivery. The volume is based on papers presented at the conference on Cross-Media Service Delivery-CMSD-2003 that took place in Santorini, Greece in May 2003. Each contribution was reviewed by at least two reviewers-typically three. From the 30 papers that were submitted 20 were selected for presentation at the conference. Those were further "shepherded" by programme committee members to be improved according to the review suggestions.

This brief presents a peer-to-peer (P2P) web-hosting infrastructure (named pWeb) that can transform networked, home-entertainment devices into lightweight collaborating Web servers for persistently storing and serving multimedia and web content. The issues addressed include ensuring content availability, Plexus routing and indexing, naming schemes, web ID, collaborative web search, network architecture and content indexing. In pWeb, user-generated voluminous multimedia content is proactively uploaded to a nearby network location (preferably within the same LAN or at least, within the same ISP) and a structured P2P mechanism ensures Internet accessibility by tracking the original content and its replicas. This new paradigm of information management strives to provide low or no-cost cloud storage and entices the end users to upload voluminous multimedia content to the cloud data centers. However, it leads to difficulties in privacy, network architecture and content availability. Concise and practical, this brief examines the benefits and pitfalls of the pWeb web-hosting infrastructure. It is designed for professionals and practitioners working on P2P and web management and is also a useful resource for advanced-level students studying networks or multimedia.

Semantic Video Object Segmentation for Content-Based Multimedia Applications provides a thorough review of state-of-the-art techniques as well as describing several novel ideas and algorithms for semantic object extraction from image sequences. Semantic object extraction is an essential element in content-based multimedia services, such as the newly developed MPEG4 and MPEG7 standards. An interactive system called SIVOG (Smart Interactive Video Object Generation) is presented, which converts user's semantic input into a form that can be conveniently integrated with low-level video processing. Thus, high-level semantic information and low-level video features are integrated seamlessly into a smart segmentation system. A region and temporal adaptive algorithm was further proposed to improve the efficiency of the SIVOG system so that it is feasible to achieve nearly real-time video object segmentation with robust and accurate performances. Also included is an examination of the shape coding problem and the object segmentation problem simultaneously. Semantic Video Object Segmentation for Content-Based Multimedia Applications will be of great interest to research scientists and graduate-level students working in the area of content-based multimedia representation and applications and its related fields.

Advanced communications and information technologies provide the basis for operational risk management. In order to support managers in real-time risk assessment and decision-making, the advanced technologies must be complemented by an appropriate reasoning logic. This book presents such a reasoning logic for operational risk management. Chapter 1 discusses the need for operational risk management and the feasibility of its use based upon advances in sensing, mobile communications, and satellite positioning technologies. Chapter II presents a reasoning logic for operational risk management that capitalizes upon these developments. Chapter III illustrates the integration of the reasoning logic in hypermedia, multimedia, and virtual reality systems, coupled with the capabilities provided by the Internet. Chapters IV-VI illustrate the realism of operational risk management for hazardous material transportation, emergency response, air raid command, and emergency response at a nuclear power generation facility. The book closes with an experimental assessment of the logic and associated decision aids in Chapter VII. Audience: Researchers, who will find the most recent advances in operational risk management with experimental assessments. Practitioners, who are provided with a detailed description of operational risk management and the latest advances in information and communications technologies to implement this new approach for managing risks in operational settings, such as transportation of hazardous materials and emergency response. Students, who will learn the basic concepts in theory and practice of building models for decision and risk analysis, and embedding them into commercial software as decision support systems.

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important challenge for the modern CE industry is the design of user interfaces for CE products that enable interactions which are natural, intuitive and fun. As many CE products are supplied with microphones and cameras, the exploitation of both audio and visual information for interactive multimedia is a growing field of research. Collecting together contributions from an international selection of experts, including leading researchers in industry, this unique text presents the latest advances in applications of multimedia interaction and user interfaces for consumer electronics. Covering issues of both multimedia content analysis and human-machine interaction, the book examines a wide range of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, audio and speech processing, communications, artificial intelligence and media technology. Topics and features: introduces novel computationally efficient algorithms to extract semantically meaningful audio-visual events; investigates modality allocation in intelligent multimodal presentation systems, taking into account the cognitive impacts of modality on human information processing; provides an overview on gesture control technologies for CE; presents systems for natural human-computer interaction, virtual content insertion, and human action retrieval; examines techniques for 3D face pose estimation, physical activity recognition, and video summary quality evaluation; discusses the features that characterize the new generation of CE and examines how web services can be integrated with CE products for improved user experience. This book is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working in areas of multimedia analysis, human-computer interaction and interactive user interfaces. Graduate students studying computer vision, pattern recognition and multimedia will also find this a useful reference.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multimedia and Signal Processing, CMSP 2012, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2012. The 79 full papers included in the volume were selected from 328 submissions from 10 different countries and regions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer and machine vision, feature extraction, image enhancement and noise filtering, image retrieval, image segmentation, imaging techniques & 3D imaging, pattern recognition, multimedia systems, architecture, and applications, visualization, signal modeling, identification & prediction, speech & language processing, time-frequency signal analysis.

Heterogeneous Network Quality of Service Systems will be especially useful for networking professionals and researchers, advanced level students, and other information technology professionals whose work relate to the Internet.

With a preface by Ton Kalker. Informed Watermarking is an essential tool for both academic and professional researchers working in the areas of multimedia security, information embedding, and communication. Theory and practice are linked, particularly in the area of multi-user communication. From the Preface: Watermarking has become a more mature discipline with proper foundation in both signal processing and information theory. We can truly say that we are in the era of second generation watermarking. This book is first in addressing watermarking problems in terms of second-generation insights. It provides a complete overview of the most important results on capacity and security. The Costa scheme, and in particular a simpler version of it, the Scalar Costa scheme, is studied in great detail. An important result of this book is that it is possible to approach the Shannon limit within a few decibels in a practical system. These results are verified on real-world data, not only the classical category of images, but also on chemical structure sets.Inspired by the work of Moulin and O'Sullivan, this book also addresses security aspects by studying AGWN attacks in terms of game theory. The authors of Informed Watermarking give a well-written expose of how watermarking came of age, where we are now, and what to expect in the future. It is my expectation that this book will be a standard reference on second-generation watermarking for the years to come. Ton Kalker, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

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.

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.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Khaled Fazel Stefan Kaiser Digital Microwave Systems German Aerospace Center (DLR) Bosch Telecom GmbH Institute for Communications Technology D-71522 Backnang, Germany D-82234 Wessling, Germany In this last decade of this millennium the technique of multi-carrier transmission for wireless broadband multimedia applications has been receiving wide interests. Its first great success was in 1990 as it was selected in the European Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard. Its further prominent successes were in 1995 and 1998 as it was selected as modulation scheme in the European Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T) and in three broadband wireless indoor standards, namely ETSI-Hiperlan-II, American IEEE-802. 11 and Japanese MMAC, respectively. The benefits and success of multi-carrier (MC) modulation in one side and the flexibility offered by spread spectrum (SS) technique in other hand motivated many researchers to investigate the combination of both techniques, known as multi-carrier spread-spectrum (MC-SS). This combination benefits from the main advantages of both systems and offers high flexibility, high spectral efficiency, simple detection strategies, narrow band interference rejection capability, etc. . The basic principle of this combination is straightforward: The spreading is performed as direct SS (DS-SS) but instead of transmitting the chips over a single sequence carrier, several sub-carriers could be employed. As depicted in Figure 1, after spreading with assigned user specific code of processing gain G the frequency mapping and multi-carrier modulation is applied. In the receiver side after multi-carrier demodulation and frequency de-mapping, the corresponding detection algorithm will be performed.

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.

Cellular Automata Transforms describes a new approach to using the dynamical system, popularly known as cellular automata (CA), as a tool for conducting transforms on data. Cellular automata have generated a great deal of interest since the early 1960s when John Conway created the `Game of Life'. This book takes a more serious look at CA by describing methods by which information building blocks, called basis functions (or bases), can be generated from the evolving states. These information blocks can then be used to construct any data. A typical dynamical system such as CA tend to involve an infinite possibilities of rules that define the inherent elements, neighborhood size, shape, number of states, and modes of association, etc. To be able to build these building blocks an elegant method had to be developed to address a large subset of these rules. A new formula, which allows for the definition a large subset of possible rules, is described in the book. The robustness of this formula allows searching of the CA rule space in order to develop applications for multimedia compression, data encryption and process modeling. Cellular Automata Transforms is divided into two parts. In Part I the fundamentals of cellular automata, including the history and traditional applications are outlined. The challenges faced in using CA to solve practical problems are described. The basic theory behind Cellular Automata Transforms (CAT) is developed in this part of the book. Techniques by which the evolving states of a cellular automaton can be converted into information building blocks are taught. The methods (including fast convolutions) by which forward and inverse transforms of any data can be achieved are also presented. Part II contains a description of applications of CAT. Chapter 4 describes digital image compression, audio compression and synthetic audio generation, three approaches for compressing video data. Chapter 5 contains both symmetric and public-key implementation of CAT encryption. Possible methods of attack are also outlined. Chapter 6 looks at process modeling by solving differential and integral equations. Examples are drawn from physics and fluid dynamics.

Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE-a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards provides a detailed introduction to the methods, implementations, and official standards of state-of-the-art audio coding technology. In the book, the theory and implementation of each of the basic coder building blocks is addressed. The building blocks are then fit together into a full coder and the reader is shown how to judge the performance of such a coder. Finally, the authors discuss the features, choices, and performance of the main state-of-the-art coders defined in the ISO/IEC MPEG and HDTV standards and in commercial use today. The ultimate goal of this book is to present the reader with a solid enough understanding of the major issues in the theory and implementation of perceptual audio coders that they are able to build their own simple audio codec. There is no other source available where a non-professional has access to the true secrets of audio coding.

Software Visualization: From Theory to Practice was initially selected as a special volume for "The Annals of Software Engineering (ANSE) Journal," which has been discontinued. This special edited volume, is the first to discuss software visualization in the perspective of software engineering. It is a collection of 14 chapters on software visualization, covering the topics from theory to practical systems. The chapters are divided into four Parts: Visual Formalisms, Human Factors, Architectural Visualization, and Visualization in Practice. They cover a comprehensive range of software visualization topics, including
*Visual programming theory and techniques for rapid software prototyping and graph visualization, including distributed programming;
*Visual formalisms such as Flowchart, Event Graph, and Process Communication Graph;
*Graph-oriented distributed programming;
*Program visualization for software understanding, testing/debugging and maintenance;
*Object-oriented re-design based on legacy procedural software;
*Cognitive models for designing software exploration tools;
*Human comprehensibility of visual modeling diagrams in UML;
*UML extended with pattern compositions for software reuse;
*Visualization of software architecture and Web architecture for better understanding;
*Visual programming and program visualization for music synthesizers;
*Drawing diagrams nicely using clustering techniques for software engineering.

Software Visualization: From Theory to Practice is designed to meet the needs of both an academic and a professional audience composed of researchers and software developers. This book is also suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students in software engineering and computer science, as a secondary text or a reference.

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.