ON THE APPLICATIONS OF MULTIMEDIA PROCESSING TO COMMUNICATIONS

The challenge of multimedia processing is to provide services that sea mlessly integrate text sound, image, and video information and to do i t in a way that preserves the ease of use and interactivity of convent ional plain old telephone service (POTS) telephony, irrelevant of the bandwidth or means of access of the connection to the sen,ice. To achi eve this goal, there are a number of technological problems that must be considered, including: compression and coding of multimedia signals , including algorithmic issues, standards issues, and transmission iss ues; synthesis and recognition of multimedia signals, including speech , images, handwriting, and text; organization, storage, aid retrieval of multimedia signals, including the appropriate method and speed of d elivery (e.g., streaming versus full downloading), resolution (includi ng layering or embedded versions of the signal), and quality of servic e, i.e., perceived quality of the resulting signal; access methods to the multimedia signal (i.e., matching the user to the machine), includ ing spoken natural language interfaces, agent interfaces, and media co nversion tools; searching (i.e., based on machine intelligence) by tex t, speech, and image queries; browsing (i.e., based on human intellige nce) by accessing the text, by voice, or by indexed images. In each of these areas, a great deal of progress has been made in the past few y ears, driven in parr by the relentless growth in multimedia personal c omputers and in part by the promise of broad-band access from the home and from wireless connections. Standards have also played a key role in driving new multimedia services, both on the POTS network and on th e Internet. It is the purpose of this paper to review the status of th e technology in each of the areas listed above and to illustrate curre nt capabilities by describing several multimedia applications that hav e been implemented at AT&T Labs over the past several years.