Although multimedia processing is very common, getting started in this arena is not as simple as churning out some dialog boxes and some Java code. Check out this book and you will have a good idea of both the topic area and methods that will prove very useful. You won’t find a detailed implementation of a Hough Transform, but that is something you can often find in a runtime library. What you really need to know is where it is used.
Katz and Gentile start out with DSP basics—this is a section on Analog Devices’ Blackfin processor—but the rest of the book is presented in a more generic fashion applicable to almost any DSP. The book does a good job covering internal and external memory types and architectures. The chapter on resource partitioning and code optimization is especially good with short tips that are both useful and easy to remember.
The book transitions from a DSP overview into audio processing. This chapter includes a good overview of floating- and fixed-point DSP support, and then provides brief coverage of various audio and speech compression algorithms. None of the latter are examined in detail. However, that much detail would significantly expand the size of the book and there is a lot more to cover.
Video and image processing comes next. This chapter goes into a bit more detail and includes a nice application walk-through before running through various algorithms. The walk-through presents some basic transforms and a little matrix work, but nothing extensive. The Media Processing Frameworks chapter looks at frameworks and also tackles things like dual-core processor architectures and DSP programming models.
The last chapter covers a large number of application examples. Of course, each example is really a short overview. Not surprising given the number of examples and amount of space left in the book. Still, the chapter gives a good flavor of the kinds of multimedia applications a DSP can handle.
The accompanying CD-ROM contains various support material, including Blackfin documentation. It also includes a demo version of the Blackfin development tools.
Novice DSP developers or those unfamiliar with DSP details will get the most out of this book. It is a great starting point that is nicely followed by using the supplied development tools.
