Special issue on advanced intelligent multimedia applications for next generation environments

Abstract

Next generation (NG) environments have recently raised relevant interests in both the academic and industrial research communities as one of the most promising application fields for intelligent computing services. In fact, the NG application domain poses unique challenges such as various services to enable working from home, remote education, remote diagnosis, virtual shopping, network gaming, and portal & high quality VOD with no limitations on space and time, and so on. Specially, advanced intelligent multimedia applications for NG have been coming as a new paradigm. This special issue aims to address the advanced intelligent multimedia applications for NG. Submissions to this special issue come from an open call for papers as well as from selected papers presented at the 2008 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Multimedia Computing (UMC-08) held at Hobart, Australia, from 13 to 15 October, 2008. Accordingly, a number of papers included in this special issue concentrate on advanced intelligent multimedia applications including topics like smart homes, intelligent multimedia systems, human communication interaction, context-awareness, advanced image processing, security issues that are associated with next generation multimedia applications. Kim et al. has proposed a shape-based index matching scheme for camera view invariant 3-D object retrieval. Especially, in order to remove redundant camera views to be indexed, authors investigate the symmetrical shape pattern of objects and propose two camera view skimming methods, which are mirror shape pairing and camera view pruning. Through Multimed Tools Appl (2010) 47:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s11042-009-0427-0