|
Definition
As more and more audiovisual
information becomes available from many sources around the world, many people
would like to use this information for various purposes. This challenging situation
led to the need for a solution that quickly and efficiently searches for and/or
filters various types of multimedia material that's interesting to the user.
For example, finding information by rich-spoken queries, hand-drawn images, and
humming improves the user-friendliness of computer systems and finally addresses
what most people have been expecting from computers. For professionals, a new
generation of applications will enable high-quality information search and retrieval.
For example, TV program producers
can search with "laser-like precision" for occurrences of famous events
or references to certain people, stored in thousands of hours of audiovisual records,
in order to collect material for a program. This will reduce program production
time and increase the quality of its content.
MPEG-7 is a multimedia content
description standard, (to be defined by September 2001), that addresses how humans
expect to interact with computer systems, since it develops rich descriptions
that reflect those expectations. The
Moving Pictures Experts Group abbreviated MPEG is part of the International Standards
Organization (ISO), and defines standards for digital video and digital audio.
The primal task of this group was to develop a format to play back video and audio
in real time from a CD. Meanwhile the demands have raised and beside the CD the
DVD needs to be supported as well as transmission equipment like satellites and
networks. All this operational uses are covered by a broad selection of standards.
Well known are the standards MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and MPEG-7. Each
standard provides levels and profiles to support special applications in an optimized
way.
It's clearly much more fun to develop multimedia content than to index
it. The amount of multimedia content available -- in digital archives, on the
World Wide Web, in broadcast data streams and in personal and professional databases
-- is growing out of control. But this enthusiasm has led to increasing difficulties
in accessing, identifying and managing such resources due to their volume and
complexity and a lack of adequate indexing standards. The large number of recently
funded DLI-2 projects related to the resource discovery of different media types,
including music, speech, video and images, indicates an acknowledgement of this
problem and the importance of this field of research for digital libraries.
MPEG-7 is being developed by the Moving Pictures
Expert Group (MPEG) a working group of ISO/IEC. Unlike the preceding MPEG standards
(MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4) which have mainly addressed coded representation of audio-visual
content, MPEG-7 focuses on representing information about the content, not the
content itself.
The goal of the MPEG-7 standard, formally called the "Multimedia
Content Description Interface", is to provide a rich set of standardized
tools to describe multimedia content.
<<back |