Editorial: Technologies for interactive multimedia services

The last few years have witnessed a significant development in the means to produce and make available multimedia content, namely owing to the democratisation of access to digital picture and video cameras in addition to the generalisation of Internet usage. The trend now is to allow ubiquitous access to this ever-increasing amount of multimedia content, enabling a user to find effectively the desired information. This Special Section of IEE Proceedings Vision, Image & Signal Processing addresses some of the enabling technologies for providing interactive multimedia services. All the papers in this Special Section correspond to extended versions of papers presented at the 5th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) held in April 21-23, 2004, at the Instituto Superior Te´cnico, Lisboa, Portugal.