Advances in visual content analysis and adaptation for multimedia communications [Guest editorial]

The eight tutorial papers in this special section focus on ways to effectively improve the usability, efficiency, and robustness of multimedia communications in general and visual content access, adaptation, and delivery in particular. Visual analysis and processing methods must be able to provide automatic or semi-automatic solutions for: high accuracy content segmentation and representation; content-aware robust visual data compression; adapting or transcoding data for various channels and terminals; scalability across the visual content; and content and network-aware cross-layer optimized video transmission.