Excerpt
Preface
Multimedia Systems are becoming an integralpart of our heterogeneous computing and communication environment. We have seenan explosive growth of multimedia computing, communication, and applications overthe last decade. The World Wide Web, conferencing, digital entertainment, and otherwidely used applications are using not only text and images but also video, audio, andother continuous media. In the future, all computers and networks will include multi-mediadevices. They will also require corresponding processing and communicationsupport to provide appropriate services for multimedia applications in a seamless andoften also ubiquitous way.
This book is the first of three volumes that will together present the fundamentalsof multimedia in a balanced way, particularly the areas of devices, systems, servicesand applications. In this book, we emphasize the field of multimedia devices. We alsodiscuss how media data affects content processing. In Chapter 2 we present genericmultimedia characteristics and basic requirements of multimedia systems. Chapters 3through 6 discuss basic concepts of individual media. Chapter 3 describes audio concepts,such as sound perception and psychoacoustic, audio representation on computers;music and the MIDI standard; as well as speech signals with their input, output, andtransmission issues. Chapter 4 concentrates on graphics and image characteristics, presentingimage formats, image analysis, image synthesis, reconstruction of images aswell as graphics and image output options. Chapter 5 goes into some detail about videosignals, television formats, and digitization of video signals. Chapter 6 completes thepresentation on individual media, addressing computer-based animation, its basic concepts,specification of animations, and methods of controlling them. Chapter 7 extensivelydescribes compression concepts, such as run-length coding, Huffman coding, subband coding, and current compression standards such as JPEG, diverse MPEG formats,H.263 and others. Multimedia requires new considerations for storage devices,and we present in Chapter 8 basic optical storage technology as well as techniques thatrepresent the core of the Compact Disc-Digital Audio (CD-DA), Compact Disc-ReadOnly Memory (CD-ROM), and Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) technologies. InChapter 9, we summarize our conclusions utilizing the concepts in previous chapters andshowing our projections for future needs in content processing and analysis.
Volume 1 will be followed by Volume 2 and Volume 3 of Multimedia Fundamentals.Volume 2 will concentrate on the operating system and networking aspects of distributedmultimedia systems. Multimedia fundamentals in the System and Servicedomain will be covered, such as Quality of Service, soft-real-time scheduling, mediaservers and disk scheduling, streaming protocols, group communication, and synchronization.Volume 3 will emphasize some of the problems in the Service and Applicationdomains of a distributed multimedia system. Coverage will include fundamental algorithms,concepts and basic principles in multimedia databases, multimedia programming,multimedia security, hypermedia documents, multimedia design, user interfaces,multimedia education, and generic multimedia applications for multimedia preparation,integration, transmission, and usage.
Overall the book has the character of a reference book, covering a wide scope. Ithas evolved from the third edition of our multimedia technology book, published inGerman in 2000 Ste00. (Figures from this book were reused with the permission ofSpringer-Verlag). However, several sections in the three upcoming volumes havechanged from the corresponding material in the previous book. The results, presented inthis book, can serve as a groundwork for the development of fundamental componentsat the device and storage levels in a multimedia system. The book can be used by computerprofessionals who are interested in multimedia systems or as a textbook for introductorymultimedia courses in computer science and related disciplines. Throughoutwe emphasize how the handling of multimedia in the device domain will have clearimplications in content processing.
To help instructors using this book, additional material is available via our Website at http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/mm-book/
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