The ACM Multimedia Conference Proceedings presents an exciting mixture of technology and art. Papers and panels focus on virtual reality, multimedia databases, data compression, video and audio, and sample applications.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. 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 characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

Describes ITU H H.323 and H.324, H.263, ITU-T video, and MPEG-4 standards, systems, and coding; IP and ATM networks; multimedia search and retrieval; image retrieval in digital laboratories; and the status and direction of MPEG-7.

This book is primarily a summary of research done over 10 years in multimedia and virtual reality, which fits within a wider interest of exploiting psychological theory to improve the process of designing interactive systems. The subject matter lies firmly within the field of HCI, with some cross-referencing to software engineering. Extending Sutcliffe's views on the design process to more complex interfaces that have evolved in recent years, this book: *introduces the background to multisensory user interfaces and surveys the design issues and previous HCI research in these areas; *explains the basic psychology for design of multisensory user interfaces, including the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems cognitive model; *describes elaborations of Norman's models of action for multimedia and VR, relates these models to the ICS cognitive model, and explains how the models can be applied to predict the design features necessary for successful interaction; *provides a design process from requirements, user and domain analysis, to design of representation in media or virtual worlds and facilities for user interaction therein; *covers usability evaluation for multisensory interfaces by extending existing well-known HCI approaches of heuristic evaluation and observational usability testing; and *presents two special application areas for multisensory interfaces: educational applications and virtual prototyping for design refinement.

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.

Electronic Multimedia Publishing brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Electronic Mulitmedia Publishing serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Multimedia '99 covers technological and scientific areas of media production, processing and delivery. 24 contributions from research laboratories and universities worldwide give a broad perspective on multimedia research with a special focus on media convergence. The topics treated in this volume: image and sound content analysis and processing, paradigms and metaphors for multimedia authoring and display, applications such as education or entertainment, and multimedia content authentication and security.