Fundamental Media Understanding

Media understanding is the science/art of identifying semantic structures in digital media objects such as audio, biosignals, images, text and videos. Computational media understanding should do what our senses and cognition do: immediate understanding of events as diverse as watching a bird and listening to a speech. This book introduces the reader with the state-of-the-art methods applied today for media summarization and for the categorization of events. In contrast to related publications, it does not focus on one type of media but considers all the above-named as well as a few others. The author endeavors to identify similarities between the methods employed in audio retrieval, image understanding, text summarization and many other research domains. It turns out that a number of significant parallels do exist. Structuring the methods along common criteria and discussing their similarities and differences breaks the ground for a new research discipline: true computational understanding of multimedia content.