1 Guest Editorial

Multimedia field has dramatically grown in the last 20 years. We still remember the first ACM Multimedia Conference in Anaheim, CA in 1993, at which most participants even did not know the meaning of the word “multimedia”. In its early age, research in multimedia was focused on video and image compression and developing relevant standards, multimedia communication and synchronization, storage and retrieval, multimedia modeling, and creating first multimedia applications. Today, multimedia is interdisciplinary field, which is in tremendous explosion finding applications in practically all parts of our lives, from art, education, advertisement, and entertainment to engineering, medicine, business, scientific research, and many others.

We created two special issues:

Survey Papers in Multimedia by World Experts and Hot Research Topics in Multimedia

We invited experts in the field both from academia and industry to contribute with their articles, and the response was overwhelming. This special issue “Survey Papers” contains 13 articles presenting the state of the art in the various areas of multimedia, from context modeling, semantic retrieval, personalized multimedia, to multimedia data mining, augmented reality, and others. The main objective of this special issue is to present the current status of multimedia field from leading researchers and practitioners worldwide.

We thank all authors for their contributions in creating these two special issues.

Guest Editors

Ramesh Jain, Albert Del Bimbo, Tat-Seng Chua, and Borko Furht