Guest Editorial: Content Analysis and Indexing for Advanced Multimedia Services

The transition to digital broadcasting and the concomitant rise of new media channels has meant a significant increase in communication potential for media companies, which can now leverage the advantages of online digital technologies to increase the value and attractiveness of their services, thus gaining renewed value from content. A side effect of such abundance of content is that consumers are overwhelmed with Binformation overload^. In fact, while digital and Internet services are in principle more appealing due to the opportunity they offer to increase the number of thematic channels, the richness of distributed content and the possibility for the users to interact, accessibility of and interaction with such content still remain mostly unresolved problems. On the media production side, professionals often experience dual problems in content selection and organization for cross-media and interactive productions. The organization of content into searchable units through the use of flexible and scalable indexing techniques is seen as one solution to these problems. In addition, it is of paramount importance to develop the ability to generate, represent and distribute such informational units (e.g., indexes) in a way that is consumable and manageable by a wide range of end user terminals, and seamlessly integrated with web services and mobile apps. In response to these challenges this special issue presents a number of research works that collectively address many of the aforementioned aspects and enlighten several additional opportunities. The first two contributions are in the direction of advancing the state of the art in news content indexing with the specific objective to detect and retrieve relevant conceptual entities. Authors of BMulti-modal fusion for associated news story retrieval^ [6] investigate multimodal approaches to retrieve associated news stories sharing the same main topic. In the visual domain this is done through near duplicate keyframe/scene detection based on local signatures Multimed Tools Appl (2015) 74:2559–2561 DOI 10.1007/s11042-015-2540-6