Understand the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework, the standard for the creation, delivery and consumption of multimedia. This text is the comprehensive guide to MPEG-21, the technology that provides an open framework for multimedia applications. Whereas previous MPEG standards defined compression techniques, MPEG-21 offers methods for the search, access, storage and Rights protection of content. The MPEG-21 Book offers a complete introduction to standardisation, before proceeding to discuss the vision behind MPEG-21, what ‘Digital Items’ are, how they are adapted and how their contents can be protected. The book provides coverage of the individual parts of the standard to an advanced level, with chapters dedicated to each of the core technologies. The authors describe not only the present situation, but also emerging developments and the relation of MPEG-21 to the other MPEG standards, giving essential insights into the future of MPEG and its impact on multimedia. The MPEG-21 Book: Provides an accessible explanation of the MPEG-21 standards and specifications. Presents a comprehensive overview of the technical issues that MPEG-21 covers, including the foundational Digital Item Declaration, Digital Item Identification, Digital Item Adaptation, and Digital Item Processing. Offers in-depth and up-to-date coverage of Rights Expression Language and Rights Data Dictionary. Provides first detailed treatments of Event Reporting and IPMP Components. Reviews the new MPEG technologies Multimedia Middleware, Multimedia Application Formats (MAFs) and Digital Item Streaming. The MPEG-21 Book will provide an essential resource to researchers, engineers, Internet designers, systems designers, and content providers, creators and distributors in the entertainment and broadcasting industries. Students in communications technology, media technology and multimedia signal processing will also find it an invaluable guide to this cutting-edge technology.

This authoritative guide is the first to provide a complete system design perspective based on existing international standards and state-of-the-art networking and infrastructure technologies, from theoretical analyses to practical design considerations. The four most critical components involved in a multimedia networking system - data compression, quality of service (QoS), communication protocols, and effective digital rights management - are intensively addressed. Many real-world commercial systems and prototypes are also introduced, as are software samples and integration examples, allowing readers to understand practical tradeoffs in the design of multimedia architectures, and get hands-on experience learning the methodologies and procedures. Balancing just the right amount of theory with practical design and integration knowledge, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in electrical engineering and computer science, and also for practitioners in the communications and networking industry. It can also be used as a textbook for specialized graduate-level courses on multimedia networking.

Recent years have brought many changes to the world of mass media. The In ternet and mobile communications technology have provided consumers with interactive digital services. Television is catching up with this trend through the digitalization process. Digital television is a hybrid platform combining elements from classical analog television and the Internet, providing modern multimedia services on a familiar platform. In short, digital TV is a gateway to the world of interactive digital media. Digital TV brings consumers into the television service arena and offers them new degrees of freedom. However, as the service and multimedia content types diversify and the services and their content increase, television is facing many of the same challenges of complexity and information overflow faced by other digital media. Metadata can handle the diverse services and content of digital TV effi. ciently and in a consumer-friendly way. Metadata means that the data are accompanied by other data which describe them. As data about data, meta data can provide an insight into syntactically and semantically complex data by distilling their essence to a set of simple descriptors. Metadata also helps to structure and manage information in diverse settings. The use of metadata in broadcast multimedia should not be restricted to being merely a tool for coping with the challenges of a complex networked multimedia environment. Instead, metadata ofTers new opportunities for the development of innovative services.

This second edition provides easy access to important concepts, issues and technology trends in the field of multimedia technologies, systems, techniques, and applications. Over 1,100 heavily-illustrated pages — including 80 new entries — present concise overviews of all aspects of software, systems, web tools and hardware that enable video, audio and developing media to be shared and delivered electronically.

The emerging idea of the semantic web is based on the maximum automation of the complete knowledge lifecycle processes: knowledge representation, acquisition, adaptation, reasoning, sharing and use. Text-based based browsers involve a costly information-retrieval process: descriptions are inherently subjective and usage is often confined to the specific application domain for which the descriptions were created. Automatic extracted audiovisual features are, in general, more objective, domain-independent and can be native to the audiovisual content. This book seeks to draw together in one concise volume the findings of leading researchers from around the globe. The focus, in particular, is on the MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards that seek to consolidate and render effective the infrastructure for the delivery and management of multimedia content. Provides thorough coverage of all relevant topics, including structure identification in audiovisual documents, object-based video indexing, multimedia indexing and retrieval using natural language, speech and image processing methods Contains detailed advice on ontology representation and querying for realizing semantics-driven applications Includes cutting-edge information on multimedia content description in MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 Illustrates all theory with real-world case studies gleaned from state-of-the-art worldwide research. The contributors are pioneers in the fields of multimedia analysis and knowledge technologies This unified, comprehensive up-to-date resource will appeal to integrators, systems suppliers, managers and consultants in the area of knowledge management and information retrieval; particularly those concerned with the automation of the semantic web. The detailed, theory-based practical advice is also essential reading for postgraduates and researchers in these fields.

Professionals in the video and multimedia industries need a book that explains industry standards for video coding and how to convert the compressed information between standards. Digital Video Transcoding for Transmission and Storage answers this demand while also supplying the theories and principles of video compression and transcoding technologies. Emphasizing digital video transcoding techniques, this book summarizes its content via examples of practical methods for transcoder implementation. It relates almost all of its featured transcoding technologies to practical applications. This volume takes a structured approach, starting with basic video transcoding concepts and progressing toward the most sophisticated systems. It summarizes material from research papers, lectures, and presentations. Organized into four parts, the text first provides the background of video coding theory, principles of video transmission, and video coding standards. The second part includes three chapters that explain the theory of video transcoding and practical problems. The third part explores buffer management, packet scheduling, and encryption in the transcoding. The book concludes by describing the application of transcoding, universal multimedia access with the emerging MPEG-21 standard, and the end-to-end test bed.