Visual Media Coding and Transmission

11.2 Overview of the State of the Art in Context-aware Content Adaptation

This section provides a summary of recent developments and standardization efforts in context-aware content adaptation systems. It presents established concepts in context-aware computing, context models, and existing systems, architectures, and frameworks for context-aware content adaptation. It addresses aspects related to the acquisition of context, forms of processing contextual information, privacy aspects and protection of digital rights, and finally forms of reacting to context.

11.2.1 Recent Developments in Context-aware Systems

Context-awareness can be defined as the ability of systems, devices, or software programs to be aware of the characteristics and constraints of the environment and accordingly perform a number of actions/operations automatically to adapt to sensed environmental changes.

The use of contextual information is instrumental in the successful implementation of useful and meaningful content adaptation operations. These, in turn, are becoming extremely important for the implementation of systems and platforms that deliver multimedia services to the end user. Content adaptation has in fact already gained a considerable importance in today's multimedia communications, and will certainly become an essential functionality of any service, application, or system in the near future. Continuing advances in technology will only emphasize the great heterogeneity that exists today in devices, ...