K.R. Rao, Zoran S. Bojkovic, Dragorad A. Milovanovic
MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: Techniques, Standards, and Networks
Hard cover, pp. 543, plus XXVI
Prentice Hall, Pearson Education, Inc.
Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458, 2002
ISBN 0-13-031398-X
http://www.pearsoneduc.com

In general about the book

The past years have seen an explosion in the use of digital media. Industry is making significant investments to deliver digital audio, image and video information to consumers and customers. At the same time, major corporation are converting their audio, image and video archives into an electronic form.

Digital media offer several distinct advantages over analog media. The quality of digital audio, image and video signals is higher that that of their analog counterparts. Editing is easy, copying is simple with no loss of fidelity and transmitting across networked information systems is fast.

Multimedia consists of Multimedia data + Set of interactions. Multimedia and multimedia communications can be globally viewed as a hierarchical system. The multimedia software and applications provide a direct interactive environment for users. When a computer requires information from remote computers or servers, information must travel through network. The multimedia information must be compressed before it can be sent through the network in order to reduce communication delay. Communication networks are undergoing constant improvements in order to provide for communication capabilities. Local Area Network are used to connect local computers and other equipment, and Wide Area Networks and the Internet connect the LANs together.

Multimedia Communication Systems provides a comprehensive coverage of various surveys of the current issues relating to multimedia communications.

Chapter content

The book is organized into six chapters.

Chapter 1 describes the concept of multimedia communication modeling. It presents a short description of elements for multimedia systems. An overview of multimedia terminals is also given.

Chapter 2 explains that multimedia communication is more than simply putting together text, audio, images and video. It reviews a recent trend in multimedia research. The emphasis is on lip reading, synchronization and tracing audio-to-visual mapping as well as the bimodal person verification.

Chapter 3 is devoted to multimedia processing in communication. It presents digital multimedia and signal processing elements. A general framework for image copyright protection through digital watermarking and key attributes of neural processing essential to intelligent multimedia processing are also described. At the end, this chapter concludes with recent LSI programmable processors designed for multimedia processing.

Chapter 4 deals with the issues concerning distributed multimedia systems. Reader can find an overview with main features, resource management, networking and multimedia operating systems.

Chapter 5 focuses on multimedia communication standards. Authors discussed MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MPEG-4 VTC, JPEG-2000, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, ITU--T and Internet standards. They discussed the ITU--T standardization process in multimedia communications from the video and speech coding, as well as from multimedia, multiplex and synchronization points of view (H.320, H.321, H.322, H.323, H.262, H.263, H.26L, H.221, H.222, H.223 and H.225).

Chapter 6 concentrates on multimedia communication across networks. After an introduction about packet audio--video in the network environment, the concept of video transport through generic networks is discussed. Multimedia transport over ATM networks is also described. Than authors described multimedia across IP networks, including video transmission, traffic specification for MPEG video transmission on the Internet and bandwidth allocation mechanism. Concepts of the Internet access networks has been also presented. In addition, authors discussed special issues relating to multimedia across wireless networks such as wireless broadband communication for multimedia audiovisual solutions, mobile and broadcasting networks and digital TV infrastructure for interactive multimedia services.

Useful book

This book addresses the fundamentals of the major topics of the multimedia communication systems: audio-visual integration, multimedia processing in communications, distributed multimedia systems, multimedia communication standards and multimedia communication across networks. The level of discussion will enable an engineer or a scientist to design multimedia communication systems or to conduct research an advanced and newly emerging topics. The objective of this book is to provide the underlying theory, concepts and principles related to these disciplines, including the power and the practical utility of topics.

This book is primarily for graduate students, but it can be also very useful for researchers, scientists and engineers dealing with multimedia communication systems.