Special Issue on Multimedia Semantic Computing

Recent advances in storage, hardware, information technology, communication and networking have resulted in a large amount of multimedia data, such as image, audio and video. Multimedia data is used in a wide range of applications including entertainment, digital libraries, health care, and distant learning. The volume of multimedia data presents great challenges in data, analysis, indexing, retrieval, distribution and management. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of mobile device, such as smart phones, PDA, has demands for pervasive multimedia service which can adapt video contents to match user’s preferences. To address these needs, researchers have proposed various approaches to extract knowledge from multimedia (Mei, Hsu, & Luo, 2010), to promote multi-modality interaction and crossmining (Petrushin & Khan, 2006), to establish new multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-21), and to advance personalized multimedia modeling and security social sharing (Ramzan, Larson, Dufaux, & Cluver, 2010). Such research trends provide both challenges and opportunities for multimedia research. Among them, multimedia semantic computing have attracted numerous research interests owing to its great potential in whole multimedia value chain (e.g., content design, authoring, production, archiving, management, distribution, delivery, etc.) as well as its many open issues. This goal of this special issue is to show some of the state-of-the-art research in the area of multimedia semantic computing. It contains work from experts in the multimedia and knowledge technology research communities, discussing the current research on semanticbased multimedia systems, presenting theoretic framework and practical implementations, and identifying challenges and open issues in multimedia semantic modeling and integration.