From DVDs to the Internet, media coding and content processing are central to the effective delivery of high-quality multimedia. In this book, two of the field's leading experts introduce today's state-of-the-art -- presenting realistic examples and projects designed to help implementers create multimedia systems with unprecedented performance.KEY TOPICS:The authors introduce the fundamental characteristics and properties of digital audio, images, video, graphics and animation, giving multimedia system designers and application developer the key information they need to build advanced multimedia systems and applications. They reflect the latest approaches to content analysis and compression, showing how to take advantage of the characteristics of images, video or speech to specify and compress multimedia content with maximum efficiency. They present comprehensive coverage of system and end-user issues that cannot be found elsewhere, and present hands-on projects designed to help professionals rapidly deepen their expertise.MARKET:For every professional involved in implementing or researching state-of-the-art multimedia systems and applications, including multimedia and communications engineers, software developers, streaming media specialists, and technical project managers.