Scanning the Technology On the Applications of Multimedia Processing to Communications

The challenge of multimedia processing is to provide services that seamlessly integrate text, sound, image, and video information and to do it in a way that preserves the ease of use and interactivity of conventional plain old telephone service (POTS) telephony, irrelevant of the bandwidth or means of access of the connection to the service. To achieve this goal, there are a number of technological problems that must be considered, including: • compression and coding of multimedia signals, including algorithmic issues, standards issues, and transmission issues;