| dc.description.abstract | A course in Multimedia is rapidly becoming a necessity in Computer Science and
Engineering curricula, especially now that multimedia touches most aspects of
these fields. Multimedia was originally seen as a vertical application area, i.e., a
niche application with methods that belong only to itself. However, like pervasive
computing, with many people’s day regularly involving the Internet, multimedia is
now essentially a horizontal application area and forms an important component of
the study of algorithms, computer graphics, computer networks, image processing,
computer vision, databases, real-time systems, operating systems, information
retrieval, and so on. Multimedia is a ubiquitous part of the technological environment
in which we work and think. This book fills the need for a university-level
text that examines a good deal of the core agenda that Computer Science sees as
belonging to this subject area. This edition constitutes a significant revision, and
we include an introduction to such current topics as 3D TV, social networks, high
efficiency video compression and conferencing, wireless and mobile networks, and
their attendant technologies. The textbook has been updated throughout to include
recent developments in the field, including considerable added depth to the networking
aspect of the book. To this end, Dr. Jiangchuan Liu has been added to the
team of authors. While the first edition was published by Prentice-Hall, for this
update we have chosen Springer, a prestigious publisher that has a superb and
rapidly expanding array of Computer Science textbooks, particularly the excellent,
dedicated, and long-running/established textbook series: Texts in Computer
Science, of which this textbook now forms a part.
Multimedia has become associated with a certain set of issues in Computer
Science and Engineering, and we address those here. The book is not an introduction
to simple design considerations and tools—it serves a more advanced
audience than that. On the other hand, the book is not a reference work—it is more
a traditional textbook. While we perforce may discuss multimedia tools, we would
like to give a sense of the underlying issues at play in the tasks those tools carry
out. Students who undertake and succeed in a course based on this text can be said
to really understand fundamental matters in regard to this material, hence the title
of the text. | en_US |
