Intelligent integrated media communication techniques : COST 254 & COST 276

Current digital technology in the area of fixed and mobile personal terminals offers many advantages and promises a lot of amazing services in the near future. The expected digital mobile terminal technologies are driving the development of new and challenging user-oriented services. Intelligent Integrated Media Communication Techniques contains many examples and applied methods explaining the basic architecture of the mobile terminals. It contains sufficient introductory material enabling also non-expert readers to understand the topics and to make a step towards system integration of complex future applications. Intelligent Integrated Media Communication Techniques is to stimulate developers, researchers, and marketing specialists for new and critical technologies and system concepts, which can be applied in intelligent personal terminals. All those participating in the area like service providers, consumer electronics designers and researchers from industrial development labs and from academia are invited to find practical approaches and concepts for easier design of mobile intelligent personal terminals. The chapters are thematically grouped. Part I is devoted to Hypermedia data management, dealing with multimedia information organization methods for classification, indexation, storage, and retrieval purposes. Part II handles the robust data hiding methods. The advent of wireless wideband data communication stimulates a renewed interest in video and still image coding is covered in Part III. Voice-driven interfaces, speech coding, and speech recognition are addressed in Part IV. Dedicated hardware interfaces relying on miniature image sensors for the design of embedded image/video processing components and devices are then presented in Part V, whereas the closing Part VI discusses the potentialities offered by distributed media technologies, in the light of the illustrative application example of a real-time virtual-reality sailing regatta webcasting. The intention of Intelligent Integrated Media Communication Techniques is to discuss methods and techniques required for the third generation of mobile multimedia terminals and trends for the future generation services. The book originates from the European scientific cooperation networks COST Action 254 and COST Action 276 and provides an insight into selected research activities deployed within this cooperation framework.