Multimedia Computing

One of the biggest research questions in multimedia is how to make the computer (partly) understand the content of an image, audio, or video file. The field inside multimedia computing exploring this is called multimedia content analysis. Multimedia content analysis tries to infer information from multimedia data, that is, from images, audio, or video, with the goal of enabling interesting applications.

In contrast to fields like computer vision or natural language processing that adopt a restricted view focusing on only one data type, multimedia content analysis adopts a top-down viewpoint studying how computer systems should be designed to process the different types of information in a document in an integrated fashion, including metadata (for example geo-tags) and the context in which the content is presented (for example the social graph of an author). Many examples have been discussed in various chapters of this book. The top-down approach of multimedia computing mostly succeeds in solving problems with data whose scale and diversity challenge the current theory and practice of computer science. Therefore, progress is measured using empirical methods, often in global competitions and evaluations that use large volumes of data.