In the last few years we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way business, government services, education, entertainment and healthcare are operating. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia database systems and multimedia information retrieval are still challenging to both researchers and practitioners. Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications points out these challenges and provides valuable suggestions toward the necessary solutions, by focusing on multimedia database techniques.
From the Inside Flap
Among the new challenges of multimedia computing and distributed technologies, mechanisms for content-based information retrieval in multimedia databases seems to be the most difficult issue. Unlike traditional database systems, which allow query specification based on keywords and numerical comparisons, image database system requires a sophisticated retrieval mechanism. Current approaches of image retrieval rely on color, texture, shape, and object spatial relations. However, the most difficult issue of image content-based retrieval is the investigation of friendly visual specification techniques. How to visually describe the need of a user is a very difficult problem. On the other hand, content-based retrieval of video records not only involves the objects in a video, the timing of object movement is also considered. Scene identification and object tracing are basic techniques, which only solve part of the problem. Yet, tools for semantic analysis of video conten! ts are still underdevelopment. Content-based video retrieval may rely on speech detection and recognition, which are also used in the automatic retrieval of audio information. Part I is an introduction. Part II and III of this book will discuss current research status and solutions to image and video databases.
Part IV of this book discusses watermark technologies. This part of discussion is relatively new in the area of multimedia computing. With the growing of Internet users, it is likely that entertainment data, such as MP3 audio records and MPEG video, as well as still images are transmitted on the Internet. It is important for vendors to have their copyright protection signatures embedded into these multimedia records. Watermark of multimedia can be embedded into MP3 audio, video, and image records, without seriously affect the presentation quality of the records. Techniques include embedding signature, logo, text, as well as audio information into these entertainment records. A strong watermark technique should defense itself from various types of attacks, as well as prevent the destruction of signatures from data compression. With the watermark embedded, multimedia records are delivered to the end user.
On the other hand, the delivery of multimedia information is time-sensitive. Synchronization solutions to multimedia streams can be divided into two parts: intra-stream synchronization and inter-stream synchronization. For instance, an intra-stream synchronization solution involves the encoding of time stamps or the realization of other techniques to ensure audio and animation are synchronized in a video clip. The synchronization technique can be extended to include multiple streams (e.g., a video clip is synchronized with a slide show). Moreover, quality of services (QoS) of multimedia data may involve real-time constraints, especially when the service is distributed among workstations linked by networks. Solutions to QoS involve different levels of network protocols, as well as the construction of efficient network infrastructure. These problems will be discussed in part V.
The discussions in previous chapters contain technical issues, such as specification, design, and algorithms to the research topics of multimedia databases. Part VI includes real applications in image and video databases, VR technique, and media synchronization solution. The last part (Part VII) of this book will further point out other possible solutions in the future.
The audiences of this book are senior or graduate students major in computer science, computer engineering, or management information system (MIS), as well as professional instructors, and multimedia product developers. Readers can benefit from this book in searching for state-of-the-art research topics for their research, as well as in the understanding of techniques and applications in content-based information retrieval, watermarking, and distributed multimedia database systems. This book can be used as a textbook in senior research seminar, as well as graduate courses.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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