Visual Media Coding and Transmission

11.1 Introduction

Future media Internet will allow new applications to be realized with support for ubiquitous media-rich content service technologies. Virtual collaboration, extended home platforms, augmented, mixed and virtual realities, gaming, telemedicine, e-learning, and so on, in which users with possibly diverse geographical locations, terminal types, connectivity, usage environments and preferences will access and exchange pervasive yet protected and trusted content, are only a few of the possibilities. These multiple forms of diversity require content to be transported and rendered in different forms, which requires the use of context-aware content adaptation. This avoids the alternative of predicting, generating, and storing all the different forms required for every item of content. Figure 11.1 provides a generic representation of entities and contextual descriptions that are engaged in the delivery of context-aware multimedia applications.

For the aforementioned reasons, there is a growing need to devise adequate concepts and functionalities for a context-aware content adaptation platform that suits the requirements of such multimedia application scenarios. This platform needs to be able to consume low-level contextual information to infer higher-level contexts, and thus decide the need for and type of adaptation operations to be performed upon the content. In this way, usage constraints can be met while restrictions imposed by digital rights management (DRM) governing ...