Multimedia Systems and Content‐based Image Retrieval

Citation

du Preez, M. (2004), "Multimedia Systems and Content‐based Image Retrieval", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 287-287. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470410541732

Some of the important areas of research in computer technology include multimedia systems and content‐based image retrieval. Although these two areas are changing lifestyles in their coverage of creation, maintenance, accessing and retrieval of videos, audio, images and textual and graphic data, there still remain several unresolved issues that need further research to improve techniques and applications. The primary objective of Multimedia Systems and Content‐based Image Retrieval is to combine these two areas of research and to provide an up‐to‐date account of the research and work being done.

Multimedia Systems and Content‐based Image Retrieval consists of 15 chapters, divided into seven sections. The issues addressed by the various sections vary from an introduction to multimedia systems and content‐based image retrieval to multimedia structures and security, access and feature extraction techniques, content analyses and indexing techniques, search and retrieval methods, and dynamic user interfaces.

Chapter 3, Technology of Music Score Watermarking is of personal interest. This chapter discusses digital watermarking techniques that provide a certain level of protection for music sheets. It explains that classical raster‐oriented watermarking algorithms for images suffer several drawbacks when directly applied to image representations of music sheets. For these new solutions had to be developed that are designed to regard the content of the music sheets. Note that, in comparison to other media types, the development for watermarking of music scores is a rather young art and the chapter reviews the evolution of the early approaches. It also describes the current state of the art in the field. Reckons that some of the proposed techniques are strong enough to provide watermarks that persist after a significant number of photocopy levels. This is an extremely promising technique and will enable publishers to control the photocopying of music sheets.

The chapter on face recognition technology (chapter 4) is another very interesting chapter. It addresses one of the most widely used problems in computer vision that is widely used in applications related to security and human‐computer interfaces. It explains and provides the results for the various biometric systems and the commonly used techniques of face recognition: feature based; eigenface based; line‐based approach and local feature analysis. A performance comparison of these algorithms is also given.

The audience of Multimedia Systems and Content‐based Image Retrieval would be researchers who are working in these two fields. It could also be a reference guide for researchers from other related areas. Both undergraduate and post‐graduate students, who are interested in multimedia technology, can benefit from reading the book. It includes a bibliography at the end of each chapter and concludes with a useful index.