Multimedia Systems and Applications – serie

Advanced Wired and Wireless Networks brings the reader a sample of recent research efforts representative of advances in the areas of recognized importance for the future Internet, such as ad hoc networking, mobility support and performance improvements in advanced networks and protocols. Advanced Wired and Wireless Networks is structured to meet the needs of a professional audience in industry, as well as graduate-level students in computer science and engineering.

The unprecedented growth in the range of multimedia services offered these days by modern telecommunication systems has been made possible only because of the advancements in signal processing technologies and algorithms. In the area of telecommunications, application of signal processing allows for new generations of systems to achieve performance close to theoretical limits, while in the area of multimedia, signal processing the underlying technology making possible realization of such applications that not so long ago were considered just a science fiction or were not even dreamed about. We all learnt to adopt those achievements very quickly, but often the research enabling their introduction takes many years and a lot of efforts. This book presents a group of invited contributions, some of which have been based on the papers presented at the International Symposium on DSP for Communication Systems held in Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, Australia, in December 2003. Part 1 of the book deals with applications of signal processing to transform what we hear or see to the form that is most suitable for transmission or storage for a future retrieval. The first three chapters in this part are devoted to processing of speech and other audio signals. The next two chapters consider image coding and compression, while the last chapter of this part describes classification of video sequences in the MPEG domain.

Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary multimedia encryption and watermarking techniques, which enable a secure exchange of multimedia intellectual property.Part I, Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Multimedia, introduces DRM concepts and models for multimedia content protection, and presents the key players. Part II, Multimedia Cryptography, provides an overview of modern cryptography, with the focus on modern image, video, speech, and audio encryption techniques. This book also provides an advanced concept of visual and audio sharing techniques. Part III, Digital Watermarking, introduces the concept of watermarking for multimedia, classifies watermarking applications, and evaluates various multimedia watermarking concepts and techniques, including digital watermarking techniques for binary images.Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking is designed for researchers and practitioners, as well as scientists and engineers who design and develop systems for the protection of digital multimedia content. This volume is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on multimedia security.

Several works on multimedia storage appear in literature today, but very little if any, have been devoted to handling long duration video retrieval, over large scale networks. Distributed retrieval of multimedia documents, especially the long duration documents, is an imperative step in rendering high-quality, high-fidelity, and cost-effective services for network service providers.Distributed Multimedia Retrieval Strategies for Large Scale Networked Systems presents an up-to-date research status in the domain of distributed video retrieval. This professional book will include several different techniques that are in place for long duration video retrieval. An experimentally tested technology under the JINI platform, demonstrates a practical working system which serves as a feasibility study, as well as the first step in realizing such a technology.

Challenges in complexity and variability of multimedia data have led to revolutions in machine learning techniques. Multimedia data, such as digital images, audio streams and motion video programs, exhibit richer structures than simple, isolated data items. A number of pixels in a digital image collectively conveys certain visual content to viewers. A TV video program consists of both audio and image streams that unfold the underlying story.  To recognize the visual content of a digital image, or to understand the underlying story of a video program, we may need to label sets of pixels or groups of image and audio frames jointly.Machine Learning for Multimedia Content Analysis introduces machine learning techniques that are particularly powerful and effective for modeling spatial, temporal structures of multimedia data and for accomplishing common tasks of multimedia content analysis. This book systematically covers these techniques in an intuitive fashion and demonstrates their applications through case studies. This volume uses a large number of figures to illustrate and visualize complex concepts, and provides insights into the characteristics of many algorithms through examinations of their loss functions and straightforward comparisons.Machine Learning for Multimedia Content Analysis is designed for an academic and professional audience. Researchers will find this book an invaluable tool for applying machine learning techniques to multimedia content analysis. This volume is also suitable for practitioners in industry.

Probably the most interesting and influential class to the authors about video compression was EE E6830 (Digital Image Processing and Understanding) at Columbia University in 1995, offered by adjunct Professors Dr. Netravali, Dr. Haskell and Dr. Puri at AT&T. In the class, they impressed the authors with how such difficult and mysterious statements in video standards could be interpreted/ understood in plain human languages. Since then, the authors had had a dream that similar services could also be provided to interpret difficult video subjects into reasonable level of explanations in the future. The VC-1 standard is fundamentally the same as WMV-9. WMV-x video compression technologies of Microsoft have long been the most popular over the Internet due to popularity of Microsoft Operating Systems. The technologies were published in August 2005 for the first time in a formal SMPTE document in the name of VC-1, and the official standard then was finalized in April 2006. In contrast, the MPEG committee recently standardized the MPEG AVC (H.264) video coding standard, whose first version was officially published in May 2003, and several subsequent amendments and corrigenda then followed until recently. These two are highly efficient compression standards that can make hi- quality video services possible for Digital Storage Media (e.g., Blu-ray DVD or HD DVD) and/or broadband networks applications (e.g., IPTV).

Traditionally,signalprocessingtechniqueslayatthefoundationofmultimedia data processing and analysis. In the past few years, a new wave of advanced signal-processing techniques has delivered exciting results, increasing systems capabilities of e?ciently exchanging image data and extracting useful kno- edge from them. Signal Processing for Image Enhancement and Multimedia Processing is an edited volume, written by well-recognized international - searchers with extended chapter style versions of the best papers presented at the SITIS 2006 International Conference. This book presents the state-of-the-art and recent research results on the application of advanced signal processing techniques for improving the value of image and video data. It also discusses feature-based techniques for deep, feature-oriented analysis of images and new results on video coding on ti- honored topic of securing image information. Signal Processing for Image - hancement and Multimedia Processing is designed for a professional audience composedofpractitionersandresearchersinindustry.Thisvolumeisalsosu- able as a reference or secondary text for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering. The chapters included in this book are a selection of papers presented at the Signal and Image Technologies track of the international SITIS 2006 c- ference. The authors were asked to revise and extend their contributions to take into account the many challenges and remarks discussed at the conf- ence. A large number of high quality papers were submitted to SITIS 2006, demonstrating the growing interest of the research community for image and multimedia processing.

Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text presents high quality, state-of-the-art research ideas and results from theoretic, algorithmic and application viewpoints. This edited volume contains both state-of-the-art reviews and original contributions by leading experts in the scientific and technological field of multimedia. It grew out of a four-year collaboration among research groups participating in the European network of Excellence on Multimedia Understanding, Semantics, Computation and Learning (MUSCLE).Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text covers a broad spectrum of novel perspectives, analytic tools, algorithms, design practices and applications in multimedia science and engineering with emphasis on multimodal integration and modality fusion. This volume also contains contributions in the area of interaction with multimedia, especially multimodal interfaces for accessing multimedia content.Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry and academia. This book is suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering as well.

Delivering MPEG-4 Based Audio-Visual Services investigates the different aspects of end-to-end multimedia services; content creation, server and service provider, network, and the end-user terminal. Part I provides a comprehensive introduction to digital video communications, MPEG standards, and technologies, and deals with system level issues including standardization and interoperability, user interaction, and the design of a distributed video server. Part II investigates the systems in the context of object-based multimedia services and presents a design for an object-based audio-visual terminal, some of these features having been adopted by the MPEG-4 Systems specification. The book goes on to study the requirements for a file format to represent object-based audio-visual content and the design of one such format. The design introduces new concepts such as direct streaming that are essential for scalable servers. The final part of the book examines the delivery of object-based multimedia presentations and gives optimal algorithms for multiplex-scheduling of object-based audio-visual presentations, showing that the audio-visual object scheduling problem is NP-complete in the strong sense. The problem of scheduling audio-visual objects is similar to the problem of sequencing jobs on a single machine. The book compares these problems and adapts job-sequencing results to audio-visual object scheduling, and provides optimal algorithms for scheduling presentations under resource constraints, such as bandwidth (network constraints) and buffer (terminal constraints). In addition, the book presents algorithms that minimize the resources required for scheduling presentations and the auxiliary capacity required to support interactivity in object-based audio-visual presentations. Delivering MPEG-4 Based Audio-Visual Services is essential reading for researchers and practitioners in the areas of multimedia systems engineering and multimedia computing, network professionals, service providers, and all scientists and technical managers interested in the most up-to-date MPEG standards and technologies.

The rapidly growing field of Electronic Business on the Internet (EBI) includes a number of subfields, such as electronic commerce, electronic multimedia, workflow technologies, and collaboration technologies. The term electronic business implies a synergistic interaction between a number of different fields with the purpose of maximizing not only the short term profit, but the long term profit as well. In order to establish technical prerequisites for efficient electronic business on the Internet, appropriate system support is needed. This work discusses the topic of system support and its main bottlenecks, stressing explanations that link the newly emerging problems with those found in the general computer architecture field. Attention is dedicated to both hardware and software issues and their symbiotic interactions. "Infrastructure for Electronic Business on the Internet" is a useful reference for researchers and practitioners and may also be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

In order to establish technical prerequisites for efficient electronic business and education on the Internet, appropriate system support is needed as a vital condition for maximization of both short-term and long-term profits. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures discusses current research topics in the domain of system support for e-business and e-education on the Internet, and stresses the synergistic interaction of these two components. Attention is given to both scientific and engineering issues. Electronic Business and Education: Recent Advances in Internet Infrastructures is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, particularly in the area of e-business and e-education on the Internet. `There is no longer any question that the Internet and electronic communication are the major new tools for collaborative advances in the creation of new knowledge and in future learning.' Excerpt from Foreword by Robert C. Richardson, Nobel Laureate 1996, Cornell University, USA

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. Cellular Automata Transforms is divided into two parts. In Part I the fundamentals of cellular automata, including the history and traditional applications are outlined. The challenges faced in using CA to solve practical problems are described. The basic theory behind Cellular Automata Transforms (CAT) is developed in this part of the book. Techniques by which the evolving states of a cellular automaton can be converted into information building blocks are taught. The methods (including fast convolutions) by which forward and inverse transforms of any data can be achieved are also presented. Part II contains a description of applications of CAT. Chapter 4 describes digital image compression, audio compression and synthetic audio generation, three approaches for compressing video data. Chapter 5 contains both symmetric and public-key implementation of CAT encryption. Possible methods of attack are also outlined. Chapter 6 looks at process modeling by solving differential and integral equations. Examples are drawn from physics and fluid dynamics.

Coding and Modulation for Digital Television presents a comprehensive description of all error control coding and digital modulation techniques used in Digital Television (DTV). This book illustrates the relevant elements from the expansive theory of channel coding to how the transmission environment dictates the choice of error control coding and digital modulation schemes. These elements are presented in such a way that both the `mathematical integrity' and `understanding for engineers' are combined in a complete form and supported by a number of practical examples. In addition, the book contains descriptions of the existing standards and provides a valuable source of corresponding references.Coding and Modulation for Digital Television also features a description of the latest techniques, providing the reader with a glimpse of future digital broadcasting. These include the concepts of soft-in-soft-out decoding, turbo-coding and cross-correlated quadrature modulation, all of which will have a prominent future in improving efficiency of the next generation DTV systems.Coding and Modulation for Digital Television is essential reading for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, broadcasting and communication engineers, researchers, marketing managers, regulatory bodies, governmental organizations and standardization institutions of the digital television industry.

Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE--a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Multimedia Mining: A Highway to Intelligent Multimedia Documents brings together experts in digital media content analysis, state-of-art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, knowledge engineers and domain experts from diverse applied disciplines.Multimedia documents are ubiquitous and often required, if not essential, in many applications today. This phenomenon has made multimedia documents widespread and extremely large. There are tools for managing and searching within these collections, but the need for tools to extract hidden useful knowledge embedded within multimedia objects is becoming pressing and central for many decision-making applications. The tools needed today are tools for discovering relationships between objects or segments within multimedia document components, such as classifying images based on their content, extracting patterns in sound, categorizing speech and music, and recognizing and tracking objects in video streams.

Shape Analysis and Retrieval of Multimedia Objects provides a comprehensive survey of the most advanced and powerful shape retrieval techniques used in practice today. In addition, this monograph addresses key methodological issues for evaluation of the shape retrieval methods. Shape Analysis and Retrieval of Multimedia Objects is designed to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry, and graduate-level students in Computer Science.

As a foreword, here we publish an email letter of Late Professor Herb Simon, Nobel Laureate, that he wrote on the occasion ofthe death of the fatherofa friend. This letterofcondolence, more than any other wisdom, tells about the essence of the process of scientific creation, which is so important for both, the specific subject being covered by this book, and for the general science. When asked to address an SSGRR conference in Italy, prior to his death, Professor Herb Simon agreed that these lines be presented to all those who are interested in understanding the real essence oftheir own scientific struggle. Dear Professor Milutinovic: I want to extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family on the death of your father. His career was a very distinguished one, and his life spanned a most complex and difficult sequence of epochs in your country's history. Our generation (I am just a year younger than he was), like all its predecessors, leaves many tasks - hopefully no more than it inherited - for the next generation to take up; but even knowing that it must be so does not remove one's senseofloss in the parting.

The area of content-based video retrieval is a very hot area both for research and for commercial applications. In order to design effective video databases for applications such as digital libraries, video production, and a variety of Internet applications, there is a great need to develop effective techniques for content-based video retrieval. One of the main issues in this area of research is how to bridge the semantic gap between low-Ievel features extracted from a video (such as color, texture, shape, motion, and others) and semantics that describe video concept on a higher level. In this book, Dr. Milan Petkovi6 and Prof. Dr. Willem Jonker have addressed this issue by developing and describing several innovative techniques to bridge the semantic gap. The main contribution of their research, which is the core of the book, is the development of three techniques for bridging the semantic gap: (1) a technique that uses the spatio-temporal extension of the Cobra framework, (2) a technique based on hidden Markov models, and (3) a technique based on Bayesian belief networks. To evaluate performance of these techniques, the authors have conducted a number of experiments using real video data. The book also discusses domains solutions versus general solution of the problem. Petkovi6 and Jonker proposed a solution that allows a system to be applied in multiple domains with minimal adjustments. They also designed and described a prototype video database management system, which is based on techniques they proposed in the book.

Multi-Modal User Interactions in Controlled Environments investigates the capture and analysis of user’s multimodal behavior (mainly eye gaze, eye fixation, eye blink and body movements) within a real controlled environment (controlled-supermarket, personal environment) in order to adapt the response of the computer/environment to the user. Such data is captured using non-intrusive sensors (for example, cameras in the stands of a supermarket) installed in the environment. This multi-modal video based behavioral data will be analyzed to infer user intentions while assisting users in their day-to-day tasks by adapting the system’s response to their requirements seamlessly. This book also focuses on the presentation of information to the user.Multi-Modal User Interactions in Controlled Environments is designed for professionals in industry, including professionals in the domains of security and interactive web television. This book is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science and electrical engineering.

Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary multimedia encryption and watermarking techniques, which enable a secure exchange of multimedia intellectual property.Part I, Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Multimedia, introduces DRM concepts and models for multimedia content protection, and presents the key players. Part II, Multimedia Cryptography, provides an overview of modern cryptography, with the focus on modern image, video, speech, and audio encryption techniques. This book also provides an advanced concept of visual and audio sharing techniques. Part III, Digital Watermarking, introduces the concept of watermarking for multimedia, classifies watermarking applications, and evaluates various multimedia watermarking concepts and techniques, including digital watermarking techniques for binary images.Multimedia Encryption and Watermarking is designed for researchers and practitioners, as well as scientists and engineers who design and develop systems for the protection of digital multimedia content. This volume is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on multimedia security.

Several works on multimedia storage appear in literature today, but very little if any, have been devoted to handling long duration video retrieval, over large scale networks. Distributed retrieval of multimedia documents, especially the long duration documents, is an imperative step in rendering high-quality, high-fidelity, and cost-effective services for network service providers.Distributed Multimedia Retrieval Strategies for Large Scale Networked Systems presents an up-to-date research status in the domain of distributed video retrieval. This professional book will include several different techniques that are in place for long duration video retrieval. An experimentally tested technology under the JINI platform, demonstrates a practical working system which serves as a feasibility study, as well as the first step in realizing such a technology.

Challenges in complexity and variability of multimedia data have led to revolutions in machine learning techniques. Multimedia data, such as digital images, audio streams and motion video programs, exhibit richer structures than simple, isolated data items. A number of pixels in a digital image collectively conveys certain visual content to viewers. A TV video program consists of both audio and image streams that unfold the underlying story.  To recognize the visual content of a digital image, or to understand the underlying story of a video program, we may need to label sets of pixels or groups of image and audio frames jointly.Machine Learning for Multimedia Content Analysis introduces machine learning techniques that are particularly powerful and effective for modeling spatial, temporal structures of multimedia data and for accomplishing common tasks of multimedia content analysis. This book systematically covers these techniques in an intuitive fashion and demonstrates their applications through case studies. This volume uses a large number of figures to illustrate and visualize complex concepts, and provides insights into the characteristics of many algorithms through examinations of their loss functions and straightforward comparisons.Machine Learning for Multimedia Content Analysis is designed for an academic and professional audience. Researchers will find this book an invaluable tool for applying machine learning techniques to multimedia content analysis. This volume is also suitable for practitioners in industry.

Probably the most interesting and influential class to the authors about video compression was EE E6830 (Digital Image Processing and Understanding) at Columbia University in 1995, offered by adjunct Professors Dr. Netravali, Dr. Haskell and Dr. Puri at AT&T. In the class, they impressed the authors with how such difficult and mysterious statements in video standards could be interpreted/ understood in plain human languages. Since then, the authors had had a dream that similar services could also be provided to interpret difficult video subjects into reasonable level of explanations in the future. The VC-1 standard is fundamentally the same as WMV-9. WMV-x video compression technologies of Microsoft have long been the most popular over the Internet due to popularity of Microsoft Operating Systems. The technologies were published in August 2005 for the first time in a formal SMPTE document in the name of VC-1, and the official standard then was finalized in April 2006. In contrast, the MPEG committee recently standardized the MPEG AVC (H.264) video coding standard, whose first version was officially published in May 2003, and several subsequent amendments and corrigenda then followed until recently. These two are highly efficient compression standards that can make hi- quality video services possible for Digital Storage Media (e.g., Blu-ray DVD or HD DVD) and/or broadband networks applications (e.g., IPTV).

Traditionally,signalprocessingtechniqueslayatthefoundationofmultimedia data processing and analysis. In the past few years, a new wave of advanced signal-processing techniques has delivered exciting results, increasing systems capabilities of e?ciently exchanging image data and extracting useful kno- edge from them. Signal Processing for Image Enhancement and Multimedia Processing is an edited volume, written by well-recognized international - searchers with extended chapter style versions of the best papers presented at the SITIS 2006 International Conference. This book presents the state-of-the-art and recent research results on the application of advanced signal processing techniques for improving the value of image and video data. It also discusses feature-based techniques for deep, feature-oriented analysis of images and new results on video coding on ti- honored topic of securing image information. Signal Processing for Image - hancement and Multimedia Processing is designed for a professional audience composedofpractitionersandresearchersinindustry.Thisvolumeisalsosu- able as a reference or secondary text for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering. The chapters included in this book are a selection of papers presented at the Signal and Image Technologies track of the international SITIS 2006 c- ference. The authors were asked to revise and extend their contributions to take into account the many challenges and remarks discussed at the conf- ence. A large number of high quality papers were submitted to SITIS 2006, demonstrating the growing interest of the research community for image and multimedia processing.

Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text presents high quality, state-of-the-art research ideas and results from theoretic, algorithmic and application viewpoints. This edited volume contains both state-of-the-art reviews and original contributions by leading experts in the scientific and technological field of multimedia. It grew out of a four-year collaboration among research groups participating in the European network of Excellence on Multimedia Understanding, Semantics, Computation and Learning (MUSCLE).Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text covers a broad spectrum of novel perspectives, analytic tools, algorithms, design practices and applications in multimedia science and engineering with emphasis on multimodal integration and modality fusion. This volume also contains contributions in the area of interaction with multimedia, especially multimodal interfaces for accessing multimedia content.Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video and Text is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry and academia. This book is suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering as well.

Coding and Modulation for Digital Television presents a comprehensive description of all error control coding and digital modulation techniques used in Digital Television (DTV). This book illustrates the relevant elements from the expansive theory of channel coding to how the transmission environment dictates the choice of error control coding and digital modulation schemes. These elements are presented in such a way that both the `mathematical integrity' and `understanding for engineers' are combined in a complete form and supported by a number of practical examples. In addition, the book contains descriptions of the existing standards and provides a valuable source of corresponding references.Coding and Modulation for Digital Television also features a description of the latest techniques, providing the reader with a glimpse of future digital broadcasting. These include the concepts of soft-in-soft-out decoding, turbo-coding and cross-correlated quadrature modulation, all of which will have a prominent future in improving efficiency of the next generation DTV systems.Coding and Modulation for Digital Television is essential reading for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, broadcasting and communication engineers, researchers, marketing managers, regulatory bodies, governmental organizations and standardization institutions of the digital television industry.

The area of content-based video retrieval is a very hot area both for research and for commercial applications. In order to design effective video databases for applications such as digital libraries, video production, and a variety of Internet applications, there is a great need to develop effective techniques for content-based video retrieval. One of the main issues in this area of research is how to bridge the semantic gap between low-Ievel features extracted from a video (such as color, texture, shape, motion, and others) and semantics that describe video concept on a higher level. In this book, Dr. Milan Petkovi6 and Prof. Dr. Willem Jonker have addressed this issue by developing and describing several innovative techniques to bridge the semantic gap. The main contribution of their research, which is the core of the book, is the development of three techniques for bridging the semantic gap: (1) a technique that uses the spatio-temporal extension of the Cobra framework, (2) a technique based on hidden Markov models, and (3) a technique based on Bayesian belief networks. To evaluate performance of these techniques, the authors have conducted a number of experiments using real video data. The book also discusses domains solutions versus general solution of the problem. Petkovi6 and Jonker proposed a solution that allows a system to be applied in multiple domains with minimal adjustments. They also designed and described a prototype video database management system, which is based on techniques they proposed in the book.

As a foreword, here we publish an email letter of Late Professor Herb Simon, Nobel Laureate, that he wrote on the occasion ofthe death of the fatherofa friend. This letterofcondolence, more than any other wisdom, tells about the essence of the process of scientific creation, which is so important for both, the specific subject being covered by this book, and for the general science. When asked to address an SSGRR conference in Italy, prior to his death, Professor Herb Simon agreed that these lines be presented to all those who are interested in understanding the real essence oftheir own scientific struggle. Dear Professor Milutinovic: I want to extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family on the death of your father. His career was a very distinguished one, and his life spanned a most complex and difficult sequence of epochs in your country's history. Our generation (I am just a year younger than he was), like all its predecessors, leaves many tasks - hopefully no more than it inherited - for the next generation to take up; but even knowing that it must be so does not remove one's senseofloss in the parting.

Shape Analysis and Retrieval of Multimedia Objects provides a comprehensive survey of the most advanced and powerful shape retrieval techniques used in practice today. In addition, this monograph addresses key methodological issues for evaluation of the shape retrieval methods. Shape Analysis and Retrieval of Multimedia Objects is designed to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry, and graduate-level students in Computer Science.