Fundamentals of Multimedia

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.