Understanding Multimedia Documents

Professionals who use multimedia documents as a tool to communicate concepts will find this a hugely illuminating text. It provides a comprehensive and up to date account of relevant research issues, methodologies and results in the area of multimedia comprehension. More specifically, the book draws connections between cognitive research, instructional strategies and design methodologies. It includes theoretical reviews, discussions of research techniques, ad original experimental contributions. The book highlights essential aspects of current theories, and trends for future research on the use of multimedia documents.

Multimedia information systems is a rapidly growing area of research and development, attracting increasing interest from a variety of application fields including business, entertainment, manufacturing, education, CAD, CAE, medicine, etc. Due to the diverse nature of the information dealt with and the increased functionality (e.g., user interaction), the capabilities and system requirements of multimedia information systems dramatically exceed those of conventional databases and database management systems. This book presents an integrated approach to interactive multimedia documents. After summarizing the prerequisites and background information, the author develops an IMD model taking into account interaction and spatiotemporal composition. Based on this model, the author develops an integrated framework covering most of the steps during the life cycle of an IMD, namely data modeling, authoring, verification and querying, execution and rendering, and indexing.

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.

The information age has led to an explosion in the amount of information available to the individual and the means by which it is accessed, stored, viewed, and transferred. In particular, the growth of the internet has led to the creation of huge repositories of multimedia documents in a diverse range of scientific and professional fields, as well as the tools to extract useful knowledge from them. Mining Multimedia Documents is a must-read for researchers, practitioners, and students working at the intersection of data mining and multimedia applications. It investigates various techniques related to mining multimedia documents based on text, image, and video features. It provides an insight into the open research problems benefitting advanced undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, scientists and practitioners in the fields of medicine, biology, production, education, government, national security and economics.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices. Fundamental information and properties of hypermedia document handling, multimedia security and various aspects of multimedia applications are presented, especially about document handling and their standards, programming of multimedia applications, design of multimedia information at human computer interfaces, multimedia security challenges such as encryption and watermarking, multimedia in education, as well as multimedia applications to assist preparation, processing and application of multimedia content.

This volume is a record of the first Eurographics Workshop on Multimedia, held at the department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science (NADA), Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, April 18-19, 1991. Eurographics is the European Association for Computer Graphics. It is a non-profit organization, one of whose activities is organizing workshops to provide an interface between academic and industrial research in the field of computer graphics. The idea of holding a Eurographics workshop on multimedia was put forward at the Eurographics conference in 1989. Following the success of this first workshop, a second workshop has been announced, to take place in Darmstadt, May 4-6, 1992. The Stockholm workshop met with great interest and many good contributions were received by the program committee. There were approximately 40 participants and 23 presentations were given - so many indeed that one might characterize the workshop as a working conference - and there were many discussions focusing on the presentations. The presentations dealt with a range of topics, including the clarification of ideas about the different concepts in multimedia, object-oriented methods for multimedia, multimedia from psychological perspectives, synchronization problems in multimedia, cooperative work using multimedia, and building multimedia interfaces. The presentations were the focus for numerous discussions. There was also a small exhibition of four different multimedia systems, representing the spectrum from research prototypes to commercial products.