This volume covers: hypermedia; image and video retrieval; video-based multimedia applications; authoring and visualization of multimedia information; networked multimedia and virtual environments; topological and 3-D geometric modelling; and real-time and interactive multimedia applications."

Since the beginning of human history we have had a communication network that is identical with the physical distribution network. In the late 19th century we established the energy network to distribute electric and thermal energy, launching the modern society. The analog communication network became popular in the middle of the 20th century. And now, at the end of the 20th century, we have global digital information networks.Along with the advancement of the communication network, the progress of the information processing technology can be classified into three historical phases. The first phase technology is physical information processing, treating physical data from the real world. This technology is often called ?signal processing? and is based on the physical law of nature. The second phase is free from the physical constraints. It is logical information processing, dealing with knowledge and rules. The most important aspect of this phase is consistency. ?Provable? is employed to confirm the reality of the system.Based on the advanced computer and network technology, we are entering the third phase of information processing, which is ?Kansei? information processing. (?Kansei? is a Japanese word expressing some subjective ability referred to as ?sensibility?, ?intuition?, ?affection? or ?emotion?). Emotional resonance or consent is important in the pursuit of reality in this phase.Multimedia modeling to harmonize different media and systems is one of the key technologies in the third phase of information processing. It will provide a next generation framework to construct a human-centered information environment that is more comfortable and more productive.This volume is devoted to a discussion on effective modeling of multimedia information and systems for a wide range of applications. It contains 30 technical articles, all of which were selected, after vigorous peer reviews, for presentation at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling held in Nagano, Japan, on 13-15 November 2000.

Multimedia systems result from the merging of the computing, communications and broadcasting industries. This merging has been made possible today by the technical advances in high speed broadband networks, computer desktop workstations, and information storage and compression techniques.Currently, text and image are the predominant forms of information exchanged over the Internet. However, there are clear signs that the situation is rapidly changing with the recent emergence of multimedia applications in the area of education, business, e-commerce and entertainment — resulting, therefore, in increased consumption of network bandwidth and in the creation of a very large volume of information that needs to be processed and stored. This trend has made strong demands on the multimedia modeling research community to develop new semantic models that will further facilitate the creation, representation, manipulation and animation of multimedia content with a better level of granularity than what is possible to achieve with today's multimedia information systems.This volume explores issues associated with multimedia modeling information and systems and presents the current status of work in this field. It covers a broad range of theoretical, conceptual and practical topics and addresses the needs of a wide audience, including researchers, multimedia systems designers and users of multimedia systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan, in January 2007. The 23 revised full papers and 24 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 130 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections that include material on media understanding, creative media, visual content representation, and video codecs, as well as media retrieval, audio and music.

The two volume set LNCS 4351 and LNCS 4352 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2007, held in Singapore in January 2007. Based on rigorous reviewing, the program committee selected 123 carefully revised full papers of the main technical sessions and 33 revised full papers of four special sessions from a total of 392 submissions for presentation in two volumes.

The 16th international conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2010) was held in the famous mountain city Chongqing, China, January 6–8, 2010, and hosted by Southwest University. MMM is a leading international conference for researchersand industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practicaldevelopment experiences from all multimedia related areas. MMM2010attractedmorethan160regular,specialsession,anddemosession submissions from 21 countries/regions around the world. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least two PC members or external reviewers, and most of them were reviewed by three reviewers. The review process was very selective. From the total of 133 submissions to the main track, 43 (32. 3%) were accepted as regular papers, 22 (16. 5%) as short papers. In all, 15 papers were received for three special sessions, which is by invitation only, and 14 submissions were received for a demo session, with 9 being selected. Authors of accepted papers come from 16 countries/regions. This volume of the proceedings contains the abstracts of three invited talks and all the regular, short, special session and demo papers. The regular papers were categorized into nine sections: 3D mod- ing;advancedvideocodingandadaptation;face,gestureandapplications;image processing;imageretrieval;learningsemanticconcepts;mediaanalysisandm- eling; semantic video concepts; and tracking and motion analysis. Three special sessions were video analysis and event recognition, cross-X multimedia mining in large scale, and mobile computing and applications. The technical programfeatured three invited talks, paralleloral presentation of all the accepted regular and special session papers, and poster sessions for short and demo papers.

th Welcome to the 15 International Multimedia Modeling Conference (MMM 2009), held January 7–9, 2009 at EURECOM, Sophia-Antipolis, France. MMM is a leadinginternationalconference for researchersandindustry practitionersto share their new ideas, original research results and practical development ex- riences from all multimedia-related areas. MMM 2009 was held in co-operation with the ACM Special Interest Group on MultiMedia (ACM SIGMM). It was a great honor to host MMM 2009, one of the most long-standing th multimedia conferences, at EURECOM in Sophia-Antipolis, France. The 15 edition of MMM marked the return of the conference to Europe after numerous years of activity in Asia, and we are proud to have organized such a prestigious conference on the French Riviera. EURECOM is an engineering school in the domain of information and communication technology and a research center in communication systems. Since its creation in 1991 by TELECOM ParisTech and EPFL, it has developed strong international links with both academic and industrial partners. The heart of EURECOM is its internationally renowned research activities which focus on three areas: networking and security, mobile communications, and multimedia.