1.4 Purpose and Organization of the Book

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1.4 Purpose and Organization of the Book

This book is a research monograph, which shows a global view of modern multimedia systems. It starts with a state-of-the art description of technologies and methods and leads to visions with technical challenges. In each section, a key technology is selected and exposed in detail. Final emphasis is put in each part on the practical aspects of the techniques used. The reader will find many links to running or initiated projects in the field.

What is new in this book? You will read about the following:

• We give a comprehensive introduction to the new multimedia standards for distributed multimedia systems and their relationships.

  We describe the principles of scalable media coding in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards.

  We introduce multimedia metadata management using MPEG-7.

  With MPEG-21, we show the global use of a distributed system with media and metadata as first-class citizens.

  With SQL/MM, we give an overview of the structured multimedia query language.

• A detailed technical description of modern multimedia database management systems, including the following:

  • Multimedia indexing and retrieval

  • Multimedia data models and query languages

  • Multimedia query processing

  • Multimedia database products

  • Relationship to MPEG-7/21 and SLQ/MM

• An overview of components and architectures of modern distributed multimedia systems including the following:

  • Video servers and streaming

  • Multimedia communication

  • Multimedia clients

  • Multimedia content adaptation

  • Relationship to MPEG-4/7/21

The book is organized in six chapters. Exhibit 1.9 shows the organization of the content.

Exhibit 1.9: Organization of the book.

Chapter 1 introduces and focuses on the principles of multimedia data and multimedia metadata. Chapter 2 is dedicated to MPEG-7, supported with practical examples. Chapter 3 introduces MPEG-21 and gives practical use cases. From MPEG-7, we come to the description of modern multimedia database management systems in Chapter 4. Similarly, from MPEG-21 and multimedia databases, we come to distributed multimedia systems, dealt with in Chapter 5. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the book and gives a final global view of the distributed system.

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