Multimedia is now a broad “umbrella” that innovatively combines different fields of research and industry to produce practical solutions that are used on a wide scale today. Some of these fields are signal processing, imaging and color science, video and audio analysis, 2D/3D graphics, information theory, compression, networking, databases, watermarking, encryption, mobile terminals, and user interfaces. Research in each field is progressing, and our need to consume digital information has been forever changing. This has resulted in novel multimedia applications and faster dissemination of information that is constantly making our life more convenient when it comes to communication, entertainment, learning, interacting, and so on.

There are many books that address the progress of each of these above-mentioned fields individually. And although there exist books that deal with multimedia systems, most of them have been rather weighted and biased toward explaining only one or a few aspects of multimedia as a whole. For instance, many multimedia books target only the networking and distributing aspects, or only the compression and storage aspects. There is no comprehensive textbook that puts all these concepts coherently together, explaining each area sufficiently enough to understand the problems, solutions, technologies, and standards that can ultimately be used to create broad end-toend applications in this ever-evolving field.

MULTIMEDIA: ALGORITHMS, STANDARDS, AND INDUSTRY PRACTICES brings together the different aspects of a modern multimedia pipeline from content creation, compression, distribution and digital rights management. Drawing on their experience in industry, Havaldar and Medioni discuss the issues involved in engineering an end-to-end multimedia pipeline and give plenty of real-world examples including digital television, IPTV, mobile deployments, and digital cinema pipelines. The text also contains up-to-date coverage of current issues in multimedia, including a discussion of MPEG-4 and the current progress in MPEG-21 to create a framework where seamless data exchange will be possible.