Abstract
The advances in information technology, computational capability, and communication networks have enabled large-scale data collection and distribution of vast amounts of multimedia data available to consumer and enterprise applications. With the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications, reliable and efficient tools and techniques are urgently sought for multimedia content analysis and retrieval, as well as secure media streaming, distribution or communication. Though many research efforts have been devoted to these aspects, it is still far from maturity and there exist many open issues. In this paper, an overview of the challenges and issues as well as future trends on multimedia content access and distribution will be discussed. The focuses include: (i) how to bridge the gaps between the semantic meaning and low-level media characteristics; (ii) how to handle user perception subjectivity problem; (iii) how to provide multimedia network communication support for media streaming and P2P (peer-to-peer) media distribution; and (iv) how to ensure various aspects of secure media, including acquisition, processing, storage, and communication.
