Multimedia understanding: challenges in the new millennium

Multimedia understanding is a fast emerging interdisciplinary research area with tremendous potential to increase the effective use of multimedia content. Diverse application areas are increasingly relying on multimedia understanding systems. Advances in multimedia understanding are related directly to advances in various disciplines including signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, multimedia databases and smart sensors. In this paper we present a perspective on the state-of-the-art in multimedia understanding systems and also discuss emerging trends in such systems in the new millennium. A generic framework is discussed for multimedia understanding systems and a semantic video indexing framework is given.