MPEG-7: A standardised description of audiovisual content

Abstract

Abstract The value of information often depends on how easily it can be found, retrieved, accessed, filtered and managed. An incommensurable amount of audiovisual information is becoming available in digital form, in digital archives, on the World Wide Web, in broadcast datastreams and in personal and professional databases, and this amount is only growing. In spite of the fact that users have increasing access to these resources, identifying and managing them efficiently is becoming more difficult, because of the growing volume. The question of identifying content is not just restricted to database retrieval applications such as digital libraries, but extends to areas like broadcast channel selection, multimedia editing, and multimedia directory services. In 1996 MPEG has recognised the need to identify multimedia content, and started a work item formally called `Multimedia Content Description Interface', better known as MPEG-7. The new MPEG-7 standard will provide a rich set of standardised tools to describe multimedia content. The people active in defining MPEG-7 represent broadcasters, equipment and chip manufacturers, digital content creators and managers, telecommunication service providers, publishers and intellectual property rights managers, as well as university researchers. Both human users and automatic systems that process audiovisual information are within the scope of MPEG-7. This paper will present an overview of the MPEG-7 standardisation project. The paper concentrates on the motivations and objectives behind MPEG-7, giving some applications, outlining the process and work plan. It will also explain the relation with the other MPEG standards, notably MPEG-4.