Content Summarization -- Video Summarization Based on Semantic Representation -- Valbum: Album-Oriented Video Storyboard for Editing and Viewing Video -- Augmented Reality Technology and Applications -- Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Toward More Effective Display, Interaction, and Telecollaboration in the Office of the Future via a Multitude of Sensors and Displays -- A Method for Estimating Illumination Distribution of a Real Scene Based on Soft Shadows -- Integrating Real Space and Virtual Space in the ‘Invisible Person’ Communication Support System -- Content-Based Video Indexing and Classification -- News Dictation and Article Classification Using Automatically Extracted Announcer Utterance -- Automatic Video Indexing Based on Shot Classification -- Mutual Spotting Retrieval between Speech and Video Image Using Self-Organized Network Databases -- Content-Based Retrieval -- Content-Based Retrieval in Multimedia Databases Based on Feature Models -- An Efficient Index Structure for High Dimensional Image Data -- Color-Based Pseudo Object Model for Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback -- System Environments for Virtual Reality -- InvenTcl: A Fast Prototyping Environment for 3D Graphics and Multimedia Applications -- The NAVL Distributed Virtual Reality System -- Content Broadcast Systems and Applications -- Research in Data Broadcast and Dissemination -- Multimedia Database System for TV Newscasts and Newspapers -- A TV News Recommendation System with Automatic Recomposition -- Extended Digital Video Broadcasting with Time-Lined Hypermedia -- Video Images and Virtual Space -- Active Image Capturing and Dynamic Scene Visualization by Cooperative Distributed Vision -- Videoplex: A New System Framework for Constructing Video-Based Three-Dimensional Space -- Construction of Virtual Environment from Video Data with Forward Motion -- Spatial Browsing for Video Databases -- Video Databases -- AI-STRATA: A User-Centered Model for Content-Based Description and Retrieval of Audiovisual Sequences -- Use of Action History Views for Indexing Continuous Media Objects -- Semantic Structures for Video Data Indexing -- Interactive Content Creation -- A Study of Emergent Computation of Life-like Behavior by Indefinite Observation -- An Interactive Digital Fishtank Based on Live Video Images -- Creation for Interactive Media -- Visual Modeling for Multimedia Content -- Visual Modeling for Multimedia Content -- Automatic Generation of Moving Crowds in the Virtual Environment -- Extracting Facial Motion Parameters by Tracking Feature Points -- Dynamic Media Contest Session -- Immersion Reconsidered -- Synthetic Characters: Behaving in Character.

This volume is the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advanced Multimedia Content Processing (AMCP ’98). With the remarkable advances made in computer and communication hardware/software system technologies, we can now easily obtain large volumes of multimedia data through advanced computer networks and store and handle them in our own personal hardware. Sophisticated and integrated multimedia content processing technologies, which are essential to building a highly advanced information based society, are attracting ever increasing attention in various service areas, including broadcasting, publishing, medical treatment, entertainment, and communications. The prime concerns of these technologies are how to acquire multimedia content data from the real world, how to automatically organize and store these obtained data in databases for sharing and reuse, and how to generate and create new, attractive multimedia content using the stored data. This conference brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, in dustry, and public agencies to present and discuss recent advances in the acquisition, management, retrieval, creation, and utilization of large amounts of multimedia con tent. Artistic and innovative applications through the active use of multimedia con tent are also subjects of interest. The conference aims at covering the following par ticular areas: (1) Dynamic multimedia data modeling and intelligent structuring of content based on active, bottom up, and self organized strategies. (2) Access archi tecture, querying facilities, and distribution mechanisms for multimedia content.