Mobile Multimedia Understanding Applications: An Overview

In recent years, mobile devices are quickly reaching almost every corner of our daily life in a variety of forms: personal media players, smart phones, netbooks, and tablets. Besides the more powerful, smaller, and more versatile hardware, another driving force is the vast number of software applications ("apps") on those mobile devices. A number of mobile apps employ intelligent multimedia understanding (MU) technologies. This paper gives an overview of such apps. The focus is not on the underlying MU techniques, which are already covered by a huge amount of literature. Instead, it attempts to shed some light on the junction of mobile apps and MU. For this purpose, it addresses a number of important aspects: unique requirements and characteristics of MU-related apps, values brought in by MU, typical MU technologies, various system architectures, available development tools, and related standards.