Multimedia technologies are rapidly attracting more and more interest every day. The Internet as seen from the end user is one of the reasons for this phenomenon, but not the only one. Video on Demand is one of the buzzwords today, but its real availability to the general public is yet to come. Content providers – such as publishers, broadcasting companies, and audio/video production ?rms – must be able to archive and index their productions for later retrieval. This is a formidable task, even more so when the material to be sorted encompasses many di?erent types of several media and covers a time span of several years. In order for such a vast amount of data to be easily available, existing database design models and indexing methodologies have to be improved and re?ned. In addition, new techniques especially tailored to the various types of multimedia must be devised and evaluated. For archiving and trasmission, data compression is another issue that needs to be addressed. In many cases, it has been found that compression and indexing can be successfully integrated, since compressing the data by ?ltering out irrelevancy implies some degree of und- standing of the content structure.

Multimedia technologies are rapidly attracting more and more interest every day. The Internet as seen from the end user is one of the reasons for this phenomenon, but not the only one. Video on Demand is one of the buzzwords today, but its real availability to the general public is yet to come. Content providers – such as publishers, broadcasting companies, and audio/video production ?rms – must be able to archive and index their productions for later retrieval. This is a formidable task, even more so when the material to be sorted encompasses many di?erent types of several media and covers a time span of several years. In order for such a vast amount of data to be easily available, existing database design models and indexing methodologies have to be improved and re?ned. In addition, new techniques especially tailored to the various types of multimedia must be devised and evaluated. For archiving and trasmission, data compression is another issue that needs to be addressed. In many cases, it has been found that compression and indexing can be successfully integrated, since compressing the data by ?ltering out irrelevancy implies some degree of und- standing of the content structure.

There is a strong need for advances in the fields of image indexing and retrieval and visual query languages for multimedia databases. Image technology is facing both classical and novel problems for the organization and filtering of increasingly large amounts of pictorial data. Novel kinds of problems, such as indexing and high-level content-base, accessing to image databases, human interaction with multimedia systems, approaches to multimedial data, biometrics, data mining, computer graphics and augmented reality, have grown into real-life issues.The papers in this proceedings volume relate to the subject matter of multimedia databases and image communication. They offer different approaches which help to keep the field of research lively and interesting.

In the last few years we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way business, government services, education, entertainment and healthcare are operating. Yet, several issues related to modeling, specification, analysis and design of distributed multimedia database systems and multimedia information retrieval are still challenging to both researchers and praclitioners. Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications points out these challenges and provides valuable suggestions toward the necessary solutions, by focusing on multimedia database techniques.

A context-aware framework for multimodal document databases / Augusto Celentano and Ombretta Gaggi -- Endowing geographic information systems with a cognitive level / Alessio De Simone, Ferrante Formato and Nicla Palladino -- A simple fuzzy extension to the search of documents on the web / Luidi D̮i Lascio [und weitere] -- Developing a system for the retrieval of melodies from web repositories / Ricardo Distasi, Luca Paolino and Giuseppe Scanniello -- Fast face recognition using fractal range/domain classification / Daniel Riccio -- A method for 3D face recognition based on mesh normals / Stafano Ricciardi and Gabriele Sabatino -- High-D data visualization methods via probabilistic principal surfaces for data mining applications / A. Staiano [und weitere] -- A study on recovering the cloud-top height from infra-red video sequences / Anna Anzalone, Francesco Isgrò and Domenico Tegolo -- Powerful tools for data mining : fractals, power laws, SVD and more / Christos Faloutsos -- An unsupervised shot classification system for news video story detection / M. De Santo [und weitere] -- 3D-TV - the future of visual entertainment / M. Magnor -- Entropy as a feature in the analysis and classification of signals / Andrea Casanova and Sergio Vitulano

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This book brings together coverage of SQL, multimedia metadata, image processing, computer vision, networks, and database management. It provides an understanding of multimedia data and database technology and explains why advances in both have come together to create the field of multimedia databases. Exercises and solutions are included. Dunckley teaches information technology at Thames Valley University. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).