Multimedia research challenges for industry

The popularity of digital media (images, video, audio) is growing in all segments of the market including consumer, media enterprise, traditional enterprise and Web. Its tremendous growth is a result of the convergence of many factors, including the pervasive increase in bandwidth to users, general affordability of multimedia-ready devices throughout the digital media value chain (creation, management, and distribution), growing ease and affordability of creating digital media content, and growing expectation of the value of digital media in enhancing traditional unstructured and structured information. However, while digital media content is being created and distributed at far greater amounts than ever before, significant technical challenges remain for realizing its full business potential. This paper examines some of the research challenges for industry towards harnessing the full value of digital media. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.