Navigating Visual Culture: Theoretical Perspectives on Visual Media brings together an eclectic collection of theory-driven readings to help students understand and navigate the visual culture in which they live. The selections in Section I explore the nature of the visual and how people identify what they see around them, ranging from basic color to visual codes translated by the brain. Section II features readings that address the way people interpret, explain, and understand visual culture, while the readings in Section III give an overview of the various ways people participate in visual culture, whether as members of a particular media tribe, consumers of advertising, or users of personal computers. Each reading is framed by an original introduction that explains its place and relevance in visual culture, and discerning questions to facilitate classroom discussion or serve as writing prompts. The anthology also provides recommendations for supplemental reading and viewing. Navigating Visual Culture is well-suited to undergraduate courses in mass media, and can also be used for upper division and graduate courses in visual culture and new media.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in visual media coding and transmission Visual Media Coding and Transmission is an output of VISNET II NoE, which is an EC IST-FP6 collaborative research project by twelve esteemed institutions from across Europe in the fields of networked audiovisual systems and home platforms. The authors provide information that will be essential for the future study and development of visual media communications technologies. The book contains details of video coding principles, which lead to advanced video coding developments in the form of Scalable Coding, Distributed Video Coding, Non-Normative Video Coding Tools and Transform Based Multi-View Coding. Having detailed the latest work in Visual Media Coding, networking aspects of Video Communication is detailed. Various Wireless Channel Models are presented to form the basis for both link level quality of service (QoS) and cross network transmission of compressed visual data. Finally, Context-Based Visual Media Content Adaptation is discussed with some examples. Key Features: Contains the latest advances in this important field covered by VISNET II NoE Addresses the latest multimedia signal processing and coding algorithms Covers all important advance video coding techniques, scalable and multiple description coding, distributed video coding and non-normative tools Discusses visual media networking with various wireless channel models QoS methods by way of link adaptation techniques are detailed with examples Presents a visual media content adaptation platform, which is both context aware and digital rights management enabled Contains contributions from highly respected academic and industrial organizations Visual Media Coding and Transmission will benefit researchers and engineers in the wireless communications and signal processing fields. It will also be of interest to graduate and PhD students on media processing, coding and communications courses.