Guest Editorial: Big Media Data: Understanding, Search, and Mining

The papers in this special section focus on the topic of Big Data. There has been an explosive increase in media data, such as images, videos and social media in the Internet, mobile devices, and desktops. Accordingly, the area of big media data has been attracting a lot of research interest from both academia and industry. Big media data offers a promising possibility for in-depth media understanding, as well as exploring the very big scale media data to bridge the well-known semantic gap between high-level semantics and low-level features. It provides richer information, ranging from social relations to context information associated to rich media data of diverse modalities. It also provides us the opportunity to mine reliable and helpful knowledge from big media data for a wide variety of applications.