Multimedia Content Description Research Articles

MPEG-7: A standardised description of audiovisual content

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.

Multimedia content analysis-using both audio and visual clues

Multimedia content analysis refers to the computerized understanding of the semantic meanings of a multimedia document, such as a video sequence with an accompanying audio track. With a multimedia document, its semantics are embedded in multiple forms that are usually complimentary of each other, Therefore, it is necessary to analyze all types of data: image frames, sound tracks, texts that can be extracted from image frames, and spoken words that can be deciphered from the audio track. This usually involves segmenting the document into semantically meaningful units, classifying each unit into a predefined scene type, and indexing and summarizing the document for efficient retrieval and browsing. We review advances in using audio and visual information jointly for accomplishing the above tasks. We describe audio and visual features that can effectively characterize scene content, present selected algorithms for segmentation and classification, and review some testbed systems for video archiving and retrieval. We also describe audio and visual descriptors and description schemes that are being considered by the MPEG-7 standard for multimedia content description.

There's More Than One Way to Hear It: Multiple Representations of Music in MPEG-7

MPEG's latest effort, the Multimedia Content Description Interface, or MPEG-7, promises to standardise descriptions of Audio-visual material to allow universal indexing, retrieval, filtering, control, and other activities supported by rich meta-data. We give an overview of the current conception of MPEG-7, outline responses to the Call for Proposals, give examples how current practice could be incorporated into the MPEG-7 framework, and offer a few thoughts on potential directions and solutions for the standard.

MPEG-7

The purpose of this article is to provide a better understanding of the objectives and components of the MPEG-7, Multimedia Content Description Interface standard, an overview of the current state of its development and an idea of its expected impact on digital libraries of the future.

A comparison of schemas for video metadata representation

To enable the resource discovery of audiovisual documents over the World Wide Web, it will be necessary to define content description standards or metadata standards for complex, multi-layered, time-dependent information-rich audiovisual data streams. In particular, this is the primary goal of the emerging MPEG-7 standard, the ``Multimedia Content Description Interface'' under development by the MPEG group. In the past, a lot of effort has gone into generating descriptors and description schemes for video indexing but comparatively little research has been done on schemas capable of defining the structure, content and semantics of video documents and enabling validation and higher levels of automated content checking. This paper compares the capabilities of the RDF Schema, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Document-type Definitions (DTDs), Document Content Description (DCD), and Schema for Object-Oriented XML (SOX), for supporting and validating hierarchical video descriptions based on Dublin Core, MPEG-7 and a specific hierarchical structure. Finally, this paper proposes a hybrid schema based on features from each of these schemas which will satisfy the MPEG-7 Description Definition Language (DDL) requirements.

Everything you wanted to know about MPEG-7. 2

Audio-visual information must allow some degree of interpretation, which can be passed on to or accessed by a device or a computer code. MPEG-7 aims to create a standard for describing these operational requirements. This article describes MPEG-7's concepts, terminology and requirements. We also describe the influence of other approaches to multimedia content description on the development of the MPEG-7 standard and conclude with a short estimate of the time schedule for the standard.