Panorama of Multimedia Coding and Processing
R. Steinmetz and K. Nahrstedt, Multimedia Fundamentals, Volume 1: Multimedia Coding and Content Processing, Prentice Hall IMSC Press, 2002, $59, 275 pp., ISBN 0-13031399-8. The authors of this book set out to perform a daunting task: defining exactly what is fundamental in multimedia, when it’s vastly intertwined with and integral to so many disciplines. For decades the field of multimedia technology has been at the emerging point of several fastdeveloping industries—including telecommunications, computing, consumer electronics, entertainment, and publishing. Although each person has his or her own take on what multimedia is, for most people multimedia means the combination of two or more continuous media that need to be played during some well-defined time sequences, possibly with some user interaction. Practically, we often deal with two familiar media types—audio and video—in a time-synchronized fashion. Because of the time-sequential nature and variety, the multimedia field covers areas ranging from devices to systems and from services to applications. Even for the fundamentals of multimedia, a single book cannot adequately cover many essential topics. Keeping this in mind, Steinmetz and Nahrstedt decided to split the content about multimedia system fundamentals into three volumes. I’m reviewing the first volume that deals with media coding and content processing, the two most basic topics about multimedia. The second volume will describe media processing and communication and the third will present topics in multimedia documents, security, and various applications.