The project to write a textbook on multimedia computing started a few years ago, when the coauthors independently realized that a book that addresses the basic concepts related to the increasing volume of multimedia data in different aspects of communications in the computing age is needed.
Digital computing started with processing numbers, but very soon after its start it began dealing with symbols of other kinds and developed computational approaches for dealing with alpha-numeric data. Efforts to use computers to deal with audio, visual, and other perceptual information did not become successful enough to be used for any applications until about the 1980s. Only slowly, computer graphics, audio processing, and visual analysis started becoming feasible. First was the ability to store large volumes of audiovisual data, then displaying or rendering it, then distributing it, and later processing and analyzing it. For that reason, it took until about the 1990s for the term multimedia to grow popular in computing.
While different fields have emerged around acoustic, visual, and natural text content that specializes in these data types, multimedia computing deals with documents holistically, taking into account all media available. Dominated by the availability of electronic sensors, multimedia communication is currently focused on visual and audio, followed by metadata (such as GPS) and touch. Multimedia computing deals with multiple media holistically because the purpose of documents that contain multiple media is to communicate information. Information about almost all real-world events and objects must be captured using multiple sensors as each sensor only captures one aspect of the information of interest. The challenge for multimedia computing systems is to integrate the different information streams into a coherent view. Humans do this every moment of their lives from birth and are therefore often used as a baseline when building multimedia systems. Therefore it’s not surprising that, slowly but surely, all computing is becoming multimedia. The use of multimedia data in computing has grown even more rapidly than imagined just a few years ago with the installation of cameras in cell phones in combination with the ability to share multimedia documents in social networks easily.