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.

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 book brings together leading research from engineers and practitioners interested in the technical advances, business and industrial applications of intelligent systems. AIAI 2007 is focused on providing insights on how AI can be implemented in real world applications. Topics covered in this volume include: Theoretical Advances in AI; Intelligent Internet Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications; Intelligent Systems in Electronic Healthcare; AI in Business and Finance.

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.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the use of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, and MPEG-A standards, providing a detailed reference to their application. In this book, the authors address five leading MPEG standards: MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, and MPEG-A, focusing not only on the standards themselves, but specifically upon their application (e.g. for broadcasting media, personalised advertising and news, multimedia collaboration, digital rights management, resource adaptation, digital home systems, and so on); including MPEG cross-breed applications. In the evolving digital multimedia landscape, this book provides comprehensive coverage of the key MPEG standards used for generation and storage, distribution and dissemination, and delivery of multimedia data to various platforms within a wide variety of application domains. It considers how these MPEG standards may be used, the context of their use, and how supporting and complementary technologies and the standards interact and add value to each other. Key Features: Integrates the application of five popular MPEG standards (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, and MPEG-A) into one single volume, including MPEG cross-breed applications Up-to-date coverage of the field based on the latest versions of the five MPEG standards Opening chapter provides overviews of each of the five MPEG standards Contributions from leading MPEG experts worldwide Includes an accompanying website with supporting material (www.wiley.com/go/angelides_mpeg) This book provides an invaluable reference for researchers, practitioners, CTOs, design engineers, and developers. Postgraduate students taking MSc, MRes, MPhil and PhD courses in computer science and engineering, IT consultants, and system developers in the telecoms, broadcasting and publishing sectors will also find this book of interest.

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.