Current trends in multimedia communications and computing

Multimedia, as the name implies, is a combination of different and diverse media types, for example: image, video, graphics, speech, text and so on. As the information age grows, multimedia systems have also grown in popularity, especially in the arenas of education and entertainment. Examples of such applications are telelearning, home shopping, banking, tele-medicine, pay TV, video-on-demand, immersi-presence, virtual reality and so on. Along with this growth, the burden on the physical media that support multimedia applications has also increased. This implies that the technologies pertaining to communication and coding of multimedia applications also needs to grow in order to keep up with this demand. This special session is devoted to addressing some issues and solutions to the problems in handling multimedia services.