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 “Hot Research Topics” comprises 15 articles which cover the current research trends in multimedia including visual image retrieval, self-organized distributed multimedia systems, video remixing, multimedia surveillance, and other hot topics.

The main objective of this special issue is to excite the curiosity of current and potential researchers and practitioners in the field of multimedia and bring it to the next level of excellence. We thank all authors for their contributions in creating these two special issues.