Special issue on emerging multimedia applications

Abstract

Due to the latest developments in electronics industry, the emerging multimedia applications are smart, efficient as well as sensitive to the deployment constraints. The intelligent and soft computing techniques provide scalable and energy efficient multimedia solutions. The emerging multimedia tools can be used for various pervasive and ubiquitous applications such as health care, environmental monitoring, security and surveillance. This special issue includes 12 papers relating to these emerging applications. In the paper titled “Stereo Panorama Acquisition and Display for Virtual Tour Systems,” Huang and Klette investigate methods for determining optimum parameters both for highaccuracy stereo panoramic image recording and displaying. They focus on automatic image disparity enhancement while displaying a stereo panorama. The experimental results show that these parameters are critical for ensuring high quality stereo viewing. The derived formulas are applicable in technologies for stereo panorama imaging or stereoscopic displaying. Xiao et al. present “A Group of Novel Approaches and a Toolkit for Motion Capture Data Reusing”. They propose approaches for posture feature representation, motion sequence segmentation, key-frame extraction and content-based motion retrieval, which are very important for Motion Capture (MoCap) data reusing. In paper titled “A Portable Toolkit for Supporting End-User Personalization and Control in Context-Aware Applications”, Kawsar et al. address the personalization and control issues at the system interface level in parallel to context centric design. They present a toolkit that provides support for extending context-aware applications with end-user personalization and control features. The toolkit can be used with various existing Multimed Tools Appl (2010) 47:347–351 DOI 10.1007/s11042-009-0428-z