Multimedia data comprising of images, audio and video is becoming
increasingly common. The decreasing costs of consumer electronic devices
such as digital cameras and digital camcorders, along with the ease of
transportation facilitated by the Internet, has lead to a phenomenal
rise in the amount of multimedia data generated and distributed. Given
that this trend of increased use of multimedia data is likely to
accelerate, there is an urgent need for providing a clear means of
capturing, storing, indexing, retrieving, analyzing and summarizing such
data.
Content-based access to multimedia data is of primary importance since
it is the natural way by which human beings interact with such
information. To facilitate the content-based access of multimedia
information, the first step is to derive feature measures from these
data so that a feature space representation of the data content can be
formed. This can subsequently allow for mapping the feature space to the
symbol space (semantics) either automatically or through human
intervention. Thus, signal to symbol mapping, useful for any practical
system, can be successfully achieved.
Perspectives on Content-Based Multimedia Systems provides a
comprehensive set of techniques to tackle these important issues. This
book offers detailed solutions to a wide range of practical problems in
building real systems by providing specifics of three systems built by
the authors. While providing a systems focus, it also equips the reader
with a keen understanding of the fundamental issues, including a
formalism for content-based multimedia database systems, multimedia
feature extraction, object-based techniques, signature-based techniques
and fuzzy retrieval techniques. The performance evaluation issues of
practical systems is also explained. This book brings together essential
elements of building a content-based multimedia database system in a way
that makes them accessible to practitioners in computer science and
electrical engineering. It can also serve as a textbook for
graduate-level courses.
