The digital information revolution has brought about profound changes in our society and our life. New devices and powerful software have made it possible for consumers worldwide to create, manipulate, share, and enjoy the multimedia information. Internet and wireless networks offer ubiquitous channels to deliver and to exchange multimedia information for such pur­ poses as remote collaboration, distant learning, and entertainment. With all these advances in multimedia coding and communication technologies over the past decade, the major hurdle for allowing much broader access of multimedia assets and deployment of multimedia services no longer lies with bandwidth-related issues, but with how to make sure that content is used for its intended purpose by its intended recipients. The core issue then be­ comes the development of secure management of content usage and delivery across communication networks. Data hiding and digital watermarking are promising new technologies for multimedia information protection and rights management. Secondary data can be embedded imperceptibly in digital multimedia signals for a variety of applications, including ownership protection, authentication, access con­ trol, and annotation. Data hiding can also be used to send side information in multimedia communication for providing additional functionalities or for enhancing performance. The extraction of the embedded data mayor may not need knowledge of the original host media data. In addition to im­ perceptibility, robustness against moderate processing such as compression is also an important consideration.

Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards provides a detailed introduction to the methods, implementations, and official standards of state-of-the-art audio coding technology. In the book, the theory and implementation of each of the basic coder building blocks is addressed. The building blocks are then fit together into a full coder and the reader is shown how to judge the performance of such a coder. Finally, the authors discuss the features, choices, and performance of the main state-of-the-art coders defined in the ISO/IEC MPEG and HDTV standards and in commercial use today.

It started with image processing in the sixties. Back then, it took ages to digitize a Landsat image and then process it with a mainframe computer. Pro- cessing was inspired on the achievements of signal processing and was still very much oriented towards programming.

This volume contains the lectures given in honor to Georg Färber as tribute to his contributions in the area of real-time and embedded systems. The chapters of many leading scientists cover a wide range of aspects, like robot or automotive vision systems or medical aspects.

Traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) capture scalar data such as temperature, vibration, pressure, or humidity. Motivated by the success of WSNs and also with the emergence of new technology in the form of low-cost image sensors, researchers have proposed combining image and audio sensors with WSNs to form wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs). This introduces practical and research challenges, because multimedia sensors, particularly image sensors, generate huge amounts of data to be processed and distributed within the network, while sensor nodes have restricted battery power and hardware resources.

Adaptive Signal Models: Theory, Algorithms and Audio Applications presents methods for deriving mathematical models of natural signals. The introduction covers the fundamentals of analysis-synthesis systems and signal representations. Some of the topics in the introduction include perfect and near-perfect reconstruction, the distinction between parametric and nonparametric methods, the role of compaction in signal modeling, basic and overcomplete signal expansions, and time-frequency resolution issues. These topics arise throughout the book as do a number of other topics such as filter banks and multiresolution.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

The emerging Second-Generation Web is based entirely on XML and related technologies. It is intended to result in the creation of the Semantic Web, on which computers will be able to deal with the meaning ("semantics") of Web data and hence to process them in a more effective and autono­ mous way. This new version of the Web introduces a multitude of novel concepts, terms, and acronyms. Purpose, Scope and Methods This dictionary is an effort to specify the terminological basis of emerging XML and Semantic Web technologies. The ultimate goal of this dictionary is even broader than just to define the meaning of newwords - itaims to develop aproper understandingofthese leading-edge technologies. To achieve this, comprehensible definitions of technical terms are supported by numerous diagrams and code snippets, clearly annotated and explained.

Access to Mobile Services focuses on methods for accessing broadcast based M-services from multiple wireless channels. This book presents a novel infrastructure that provides a multi-channel broadcast framework for mobile users to effectively discover and access composite M-services. Multi-channel algorithms are proposed for efficiently accessing composite services.

In recent years, a new class of applications has come to the forefront { p- marily due to the advancement in our ability to collect data from multitudes of devices, and process them e ciently. These include homeland security - plications, sensor/pervasive computing applications, various kinds of mo- toring applications, and even traditional applications belonging to nancial, computer network management, and telecommunication domains. These - plications need to process data continuously (and as long as data is available) from one or more sources. The sequence of data items continuously gen- ated by sources is termed a data stream. Because of the possible never-ending nature of a data stream, the amount of data to be processed is likely to be unbounded. In addition, timely detection of interesting changes or patterns or aggregations over incoming data is critical for many of these applications. Furthermore, the data arrival rates may uctuate over a period of time and may be bursty at times. For most of these applications, Quality of Service (or QoS) requirements, such as response time, memory usage, and throughput are extremely important. These application requirements make it infeasible to simply load the incoming data streams into a persistent store and process them e ectively using currently available database management techniques.

In many applications, e.g., bioinformatics, web access traces, system u- lization logs, etc., the data is naturally in the form of sequences. It has been of great interests to analyze the sequential data to find their inherent char- teristics. The sequential pattern is one of the most widely studied models to capture such characteristics. Examples of sequential patterns include but are not limited to protein sequence motifs and web page navigation traces. In this book, we focus on sequential pattern mining. To meet different needs of various applications, several models of sequential patterns have been proposed. We do not only study the mathematical definitions and application domains of these models, but also the algorithms on how to effectively and efficiently find these patterns.

Cellular Automata Transforms describes a new approach to using the dynamical system, popularly known as cellular automata (CA), as a tool for conducting transforms on data. Cellular automata have generated a great deal of interest since the early 1960s when John Conway created the `Game of Life'. This book takes a more serious look at CA by describing methods by which information building blocks, called basis functions (or bases), can be generated from the evolving states. These information blocks can then be used to construct any data. A typical dynamical system such as CA tend to involve an infinite possibilities of rules that define the inherent elements, neighborhood size, shape, number of states, and modes of association, etc. To be able to build these building blocks an elegant method had to be developed to address a large subset of these rules. A new formula, which allows for the definition a large subset of possible rules, is described in the book. The robustness of this formula allows searching of the CA rule space in order to develop applications for multimedia compression, data encryption and process modeling.

The book presents selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, held on December 16–18, 2022, in Kitakyushu, Japan. It is divided into two volumes and discusses latest research outcomes in the field of Information Technology (IT) including but not limited to information hiding, multimedia signal processing, big data, data mining, bioinformatics, database, industrial and internet of things, and their applications.

This book presents an overview of the state of the art in video coding technology. Specifically, it introduces the tools of the AVS2 standard, describing how AVS2 can help to achieve a significant improvement in coding efficiency for future video networks and applications by incorporating smarter coding tools such as scene video coding. Features: introduces the basic concepts in video coding, and presents a short history of video coding technology and standards; reviews the coding framework, main coding tools, and syntax structure of AVS2; describes the key technologies used in the AVS2 standard, including prediction coding, transform coding, entropy coding, and loop-filters; examines efficient tools for scene video coding and surveillance video, and the details of a promising intelligent video coding system; discusses optimization technologies in video coding systems; provides a review of image, video, and 3D content quality assessment algorithms; surveys the hot research topics in video compression.

Image and Video Encryption provides a unified overview of techniques for encryption of images and video data. This ranges from commercial applications like DVD or DVB to more research oriented topics and recently published material. This volume introduces different techniques from unified viewpoint, then evaluates these techniques with respect to their respective properties (e.g., security, speed…..).