Authors Guide

The ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP) is an ACM multidisciplinary, archival, scholarly journal in the general field of multimedia and applications, which started operating in January 2004. It is the prime ACM journal in the field. Multimedia is now a mature area, having evolved over approximately 20 years. The term “media” traditionally referred to entities such as audio, video, text, images, graphics, animation. New media will be added in the future, including virtual reality, holography, haptics, eSmell, eTaste, eThought, …. The term “multimedia” has now been accepted to mean documents composed of at least two correlated media. The correlation could be temporal, spatial or semantic. Applications now appear in many fields such as entertainment, publishing, advertising, banking, insurance, e-commerce, travel, medical, defense, training, geographical information systems, weather and many others.
 

TOMCCAP is soliciting paper submissions on all aspects of multimedia, as defined above, including systems, devices, signal processing and coding, graphics, databases, retrieval, networking and applications. Papers on single media (audio, video, animation, haptics,..), their processing, networking  and applications are also welcome. Of special interest are papers on the following three major challenges: (i) new authoring tools that make authoring complex multimedia as easy as using a word processor or a drawing program, (ii) applications that make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments and (iii) multimedia systems that make capturing, storing, finding, and using digital media an everyday occurrence in our computing environment. Papers on new integrated media, including virtual reality, haptics, holography, eSmell, eTaste, eThought are also highly encouraged.

The transactions consists primarily of research papers. This is an archival journal and it is intended that the papers will have lasting importance and value over time. In general, papers whose primary focus is on particular multimedia products or the current state of the industry will not be included.

General Guidelines

Submissions should contain original material that has not been previously published in a journal, nor is currently under review by another journal. If material in the submission was previously published in a conference, the submission needs to contain at least 25% new material, and the submission should clearly cite the prior conference publication.

All material should be submitted online, using the ACM Manuscript Central System. The submission page limit is 20 pages using the ACM Submission Format . The 20 pages includes text, figures and references. Note, the additional pages needed for responding to reviewers on re-submission are not counted towards the 20 page limit. Review results are normally returned within three months of submission. After submitting a manuscript, authors should direct their questions about the review process to the editor-in-chief (see contact page).

Topics

The journal accepts publications in the three general subfields of multimedia computing, communications, and applications, each consisting of various areas of research. Note that this is not an exclusive list: other topics in these fields (computing, communications, applications) are also accepted.

  • multimedia computing (research on systems support)
    • I/O devices
    • OS requirements
    • storage systems
    • multimedia data abstractions
    • continuous media representations
    • media coding and processing
    • multimodal human-centered computing
    • media content security and rights management
  • multimedia communications (research on computer networks support)
    • real-time protocols
    • network resource allocation
    • multicast and group communication protocols
    • broadband multimedia
    • wireless multimedia
    • multimedia streaming
  • multimedia applications (research on tools and applications)
    • databases
    • distributed collaboration
    • video conferencing
    • 3D virtual environments and tele-presence
    • content authoring
    • content search
    • webcasting
    • multimedia-based teaching & learning
    • multi-player games
    • Internet television
    • multimodal affective computing