Visual Media: History and Perspectives

In the early days of multimedia research, the first image dataset collected consisted of only four still grayscale images captured by a drum scanner. At the time, digital imaging was only available in laboratories, and digital videos barely existed. Half a century later, the amount of visual data has exploded at an unprecedented rate. Images and videos are now created, stored, and used by the majority of the population. In this historical overview, the authors follow the great journey that visual media research has embarked upon by looking at the fundamental scientific and engineering inventions. Through this lens, they show that all three aspects of media capturing, delivery, and understanding are developed surrounding the interaction with humans, making visual data processing a particular human-centric field of computing.