MPEG Standards -> MPEG-7 tackles multimedia content

MPEG-7 tackles multimedia content
By Neil Day, President, MPEG Industry Forum, Sunnyvale, Calif., EE Times
November 12, 2001 (2:52 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011112S0058

The September 2001 debut of the MPEG-7 standard heralds a new wave of applications for managing the exponential growth and distribution of multimedia content such as content over the Internet, digital broadcast networks and home databases.

Users might also search for images that include certain objects and shapes, such as all images that contain a specific logo design owned by a commercial company-information that marketing agencies could find useful.

Another scenario is to search by motion trajectory, a type of search that is particularly useful in remote surveillance systems where unusual object motions at public places can be tracked and flagged automatically for review by security personnel.

Deep-level content
MPEG-7 tools are able to detail deep levels of audio-visual content. Most content-management tools describe audio-visual content at a semantic level only, outlining features of audio-visual segments and subsegments such as news programs, sports and politics, as well as titles, dates, actors, basic copyrights and basic timing/frame information.

MPEG-7 tools, however, enable descriptions of deep-level features of audio-visual content-they break down a segment of audio-visual content into its constituent elements and into relat ionships between those elements. A moving region within a video segment can be indexed into a subset of moving regions by using MPEG-7. Then objects within a moving region can be further indexed. An object can also be indexed by its color, texture and shape, and by its trajectory feature within the motion region. The spatial-temporal relationships of objects within frames of a stream can also be indexed using MPEG-7.

There are those in the industry who suggest that MPEG-7 brings nothing new to the market technically; some vendors, like Virage Inc., already provide audio-visual content-management solutions, the critics point out. The criticism is unfounded-MPEG-7's main strength is that it is an open-standards technology, which gives it strong appeal because it aims for interoperability with other leading audio-visual standards groups and consortia. With a description language grounded in XML Schema, content creators, distributors, content-management vendors and startup enterprises alike will find MPE G-7 an encouraging environment.

With more than 100 tools already developed and a firm commitment to allow new tools to extend the standard, MPEG-7 will provide the most comprehensive tool set for managing audio-visual content. This promise may not be realized immediately; initial applications most likely will be designed using the high-level catalog and semantic description tools of MPEG-7. The structural tools for describing deeper levels of audio-visual content will at first be taken up by professionals in the broadcast and digital studio industries. Search engine companies will follow once their customers start demanding better search and retrieval performances using audio-visual content.

As need increases for more multimedia content-management services, a greater number of enterprises will be created for the purposes of indexing and archiving content so that people can access that content.

A new breed of digital librarian, called a multimedia archivist, will appear, who, with i ndexing tools such as those provided by MPEG-7, will help store content for retrieval purposes. At first, this process will move slowly, because converting legacy content will create a bottleneck; however, the costs of this conversion process will eventually be covered by customers willing to pay for access to rich multimedia.