Multimedia services involve processing, transmission and retrieval of multiple forms of information. Multimedia services have gained momentum in the past few years due to the easy availability of computing power and storage media. Societyisdemandinghuman-likeintelligentbehaviour,suchasadaptationand generalization, from machines every day. With this view in mind, researchers are working on fusing intelligent paradigms such as arti?cial neural networks, swarm intelligence, arti?cial immune systems, evolutionary computing and multiagents with multimedia services. Arti?cial neural networks use neurons, interconnected using various schemes, for fusing learning in multimedia-based systems. Evolutionary c- puting techniques are used in tasks such as optimization. Typical multiagent systems are based on Belief-Desire-Intention model and act on behalf of the users. Typical examples of intelligent multimedia services include digital - braries, e-learning and teaching, e-government, e-commerce, e-entertainment, e-health and e-legal services. This book includes 15 chapters on advanced tools and methodologies pertaining to the multimedia services. The authors and reviewers have c- tributed immensely to this research-oriented book. We believe that this - search volume will be valuable to professors, researchers and students of all disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and management. We express our sincere thanks to Springer-Verlag for their wonderful e- torial support.
This book presents a sample of recent research results in multimedia services. Besides the introductory chapter, this book includes fourteen additional chapters. Nine of these chapters cover various aspects of data processing in multimedia services in intelligent environments, such as storage, recognition and classification, transmission, information retrieval, and information securing. Four additional chapters present multimedia services in noise and hearing monitoring and measuring, augmented reality, automated lecture rooms and rights management and licensing. Finally, the last chapter is devoted to an intelligent recommender service in scientific digital libraries.