4G Wireless Video Communications

6

Content Analysis for Communications

6.1 Introduction

Content analysis refers to intelligent computational techniques which extract information automatically from a recorded video sequence/image in order to answer questions such as when, where, who and what. From such analysis, the machine is able to discover what is presented in the scene, who is there and where/when it occurs. There is no question about its importance as a general method, but why it is important here? Does it have something to do with the 4G wireless communications, our focus of the book?

The answer is absolutely! As multimedia communication applications such as mobile television and video streaming continue to be successful and generate tremendous social impact, and the communication networks continue to expand so as to include all kinds of channels with various throughputs, quality of services and protocols, as well as heterogeneous terminals with a wide range of capabilities, accessibilities and user preferences, the gap between the richness of multimedia content and the variation of techniques for content access and delivery are increasing dramatically. This trend demands the development of content analysis techniques in order to understand media data from all perspectives, and use the knowledge obtained in order to improve communication efficiency by considering jointly network conditions, terminal capabilities, coding and transmission efficiencies and user preferences.

Let's kick off this chapter with ...