Trends in semantic and digital media technologies

The objective of this special issue is to report on recent trends in digital and media technologies responding to the challenges of managing and accessing multimedia (images, audio, video, 3D/4D material, etc.). In a highly selective review procedure we accepted contributions describing recent work that aims at narrowing the large disparity between the low-level multimedia descriptors and the richness of subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual data. The articles in this special issue can be grouped into following categories: Multimedia Analysis (Section 1), Multimedia Ontologies and Data Integration (Section 2), and Social Media and Retrieval (Section 3).