Introduction

Abstract

Communication technology has always had a great impact on modern society. In the pre-computer age, newspaper, radio, television, and cinema were the primary means of mass communication. When personal computers were introduced in the early 1980s, very few people imagined their tremendous influence on our daily lives. But, with the technological support from network engineers, global information sharing suddenly became feasible through the now ubiquitous World Wide Web. Today, for people to exploit efficiently the computer’s potential, they must present their information in a medium that maximizes their work. In addition, their information presentation should be efficiently structured for storage, transmission, and retrieval applications. In order to achieve these goals, the field of multimedia research is now crucial.