After thinking for long time, Gerald Friedland and I decided to seriously consider doing a text book on Multimedia.
This will be a text book for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in Computer Science and Computer engineering. Students in other areas may also benefit but they must have good preparation in programming, data structures, and data management. Many computer science, computer engineering, and electrical and computer engineering programs offer a course in multimedia. This book will be a suitable book for those courses.
Most books used in multimedia courses offer either an encyclopedic coverage or suffer from a limited perspective of the field such as a compression or networking perspective. The book will be more on fundamentals than trying to present the latest and the greatest. The emphasis in the book will be bringing important time-tested concepts and techniques to students and provide them a good understanding of different aspects of multimedia ranging from data acquisition to access and usage in diverse applications. This book will adopt a holistic perspective of the multimedia field, which is very important for the whole computer science and computer engineering discipline. We believe that by making this perspective popular, this book will be useful not only in multimedia courses but also may become foundation of data management in computer science and engineering.
At this moment this is our intention. Now we have to do something to bring this intention to life. Text book projects are long and hard projects. But we are determined to do it. Gerald will bring his energy and bright young ideas to this project, and I will bring experience (pun intended) to the book. The first thing is to think about the outline and prepare a proposal to find a publisher.
Wish us luck. And yes keep us asking periodically about the progress.
All the best for this undertaking and this is definitely needed, i.e., I would certainly consider this book for my courses. Have done a course in the winter semester regarding compression technologies and multimedia data formats (cf. http://tinyurl.com/deotwm for the outline) and have used the “Fundamentals of Multimedia” as basis but in the end was not happy about that…