Special Section on Enriched Multimedia — Media technologies supporting the digital society —

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed working styles. An example of this is virtual offices that employee can work from anywhere but still have communication tools like videoconferencing. Networking technologies have been becoming more important to support such communication tools. For example, 6G mobile communication systems, which are currently being researched and developed worldwide, are expected to realize ultra-realistic communications, including the metaverse and remote surgery, etc. To facilitate smooth interactions between humans and machines based on multimedia, it is necessary to develop cyber-physical systems so that it can be realized. Security technologies not only to protect the newly discovered value of things in the development process, but also to prevent the malicious influence of GANs and fake news are ongoing issues. Considering the above situation, it is important to develop media technologies supporting the digital society. This special section will provide valuable papers of high-quality researches in the field of protection, creation, enrichment and measurement of multimedia contents. The subject includes technologies for watermarking, information hiding, security, forensics and more. The editorial committee of this special section was based on the Enriched Multimedia (EMM) Technical Group of IEICE, founded in 2011, aiming to promote the research works related to the topics stated above.