The world of multimedia is undergoing an explosion in applications and techniques, which is fuelled by: globalization that seeks to remove language barriers inherent in text; emerging technologies: imagery on LCD flat screens of all dimensions and resolutions together with ubiquitous wireless technologies; and AI which facilitates access to petrabytes of multimedia data. In other words, multimedia is critically affected by all the current global modalities and this Special Session aims to attract a selection of papers on the processing tools, on the applications, or on both tools and applications for multimedia, which reflect the glow of that explosion.

Continuing challenges need to be addressed in energy conservation; maintenance of the multimedia Quality of Experience; adaptation to 5G technologies and the migration to the cloud; as well as the emergence of multimedia Big Data. “Multimedia Tools and Applications” welcomes theoretical and/or empirical papers from all areas of research in respect to both soft technologies such as compression, error control, indexing and searching of multimedia, and selective encryption; and hard technologies such as mobile multimedia networks, audio/video sensor networks, and energy conserving computing.

Researchers are hereby invited to submit a full paper (5-6 pages) detailing their research, or a short paper (max 4 pages) describing their work-in-progress. All submitted papers will be subject to peer reviewing by at least two reviewers for technical merit, significance and relevance to the topics. Further information is available from the CEEC 2016 website http://www.ceec.uk. Submission implies the willingness of at least one author per paper to register, attend the conference and present the paper. Proceedings will be published on IEEE Xplore. Authors of selected articles will be invited to submit an extended version to a Special Issue of the Computers journal (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/computers/special_issues/ceec_2016).

This special session welcomes submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

Multimedia security and forensics, e.g. selective encryption, key management, watermarking
Multimedia signal processing, e.g. source coding (compression), channel coding (FEC), and digital rights management
Quality-of-Experience and Quality-of-Service as well as HCI aspects
Multimedia Big Data, e.g. compression/storage, segmentation, remote indexing and searching.
Green multimedia e.g. power-aware communication over Internet of Things/Internet of Everything
Multimedia Telepresence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality
Multimedia intensive eHealthcare and telemedicine e.g. 3D imagery, remote diagnosis
Applications of multimedia networking, e.g. interactive gaming, video conferencing, workgroup cooperation.
Mobile multimedia networks, e.g. reducing jitter and latency, error resilience, and concealment, scalability
Audio- and/or video- sensor networks for environmental monitoring, crisis response, and surveillance
Cloud networks for multimedia applications, e.g. transcoding and filtering