Welcome to the second IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (IEEE PCM 2001) held in Zhongguanchun, Beijing, China, October 22 24, 2001. Building upon the success of the inaugural IEEE PCM 2000 in Sydney in December 2000, the second PCM again brought together the researchers, developers, practitioners, and educators of multimedia in the Pacific area. Theoretical breakthroughs and practical systems were presented at this conference, thanks to the sponsorship by the IEEE Circuit and Systems Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society, China Computer Foundation, China Society of Image and Graphics, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Tsinghua University, and Microsoft Research, China. IEEE PCM 2001 featured a comprehensive program including keynote talks, regular paper presentations, posters, demos, and special sessions. We received 244 papers and accepted only 104 of them as regular papers, and 53 as poster papers. Our special session chairs, Shin'ichi Satoh and Mohan Kankanhalli, organized 6 special sessions. We acknowledge the great contribution from our program committee members and paper reviewers who spent many hours reviewing submitted papers and providing valuable comments for the authors. The conference would not have been successful without the help of so many people. We greatly appreciated the support of our honorary chairs: Prof. Sun Yuan Kung of Princeton University, Dr. Ya Qin Zhang of Microsoft Research China, and Prof.
