on Applied Signal Processing Multimedia Signal Processing

This is a special issue published in volume 2003 of " EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. " All articles are open access articles distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Recent years have seen the emergence of a variety of new multimedia (text, speech, music, image, graphics, and video) services, which accompanied an unprecedented explosion in the capacity and universal availability of networks. This evolution raised considerable challenges in the area of signal processing , where new algorithms are needed for efficient manipulation , analysis, interactive accessing, compression, storage , indexing, watermarking, and communication of mul-timedia signals, as well as the associated problems of hardware implementation, database management, understanding of human perception, and so on. Not surprisingly, the field of multimedia signal processing (MMSP) has been experiencing progress at a rapid pace. As evident from the above partial lists of signals and research problems, MMSP involves a diverse research community with complementary areas of expertise. Hence the continuing need for cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas, which also motivates the present collection of research papers. This special issue offers a sample of current research in several areas of MMSP. It grew out of the October 2001 IEEE Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, and is a collection of invited papers that were selected to provide full treatment of work whose preliminary presentation at the workshop generated considerable interest. In particular, the areas of audio signal recognition and compression; human-machine interaction; image watermarking; video indexing; and video coding and streaming are covered. The first group of three papers is dedicated to algorithms for audio signal compression, classification, and human-machine interaction. In Musical Instrument Timbres Classification with Spectral Features, G. Agostini, M. Longari, and E. Pollastri propose a framework for the classification and recognition of musical instruments based on monophonic music signals. In Sinusoidal Analysis-Synthesis of Audio Using Perceptual Criteria, T. Painter and A. Spanias present a new method for the selection of sinusoidal components for use in compact representation of narrowband audio. Finally, in An Acoustic Human-Machine Front-End for Multimedia Applications , W. Herbordt, H. Buchner, and W. Kellermann address the problem of stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation. The fourth paper entitled Embedding Color Watermarks in Color Images, by C.-H. Chou and T.-L. Wu, focuses on image watermarking with particular emphasis on color information , which …