Visual Media Coding and Transmission

11.7 Conclusions

This chapter has presented comprehensive state-of-the-art discussions on various technologies and trends that are being studied and used to develop context-aware content adaptation systems. Apart from a few references included and standardization-related efforts described, it has been noted that there is not much work published on adaptation decision implementations. Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of the different elements and factors that drive the adaptation decision process has been made, as well as an investigation of the current trends in how to use those elements, notably the low-level contextual information. There is a clear trend in merging the high-level semantic world with the adaptation decision process. Major research efforts point to the use of ontologies and Semantic Web technologies to accomplish that goal. The aim is to be able to use automatically-generated low-level contextual information to infer higher-level concepts that better describe real-world situations.

Subsequently, several aspects related to gathering requirements in terms of contextual information, forms of representing and exchanging it, and identification of entities/mechanisms involved in the processing of contextual information, together with the management of digital rights and provision for authorization to the adaptation of media contents, have been presented with a view to a defined application scenario. A number of resource adaptation algorithms have been described, which ...