05-01-2010, 05:13 PM
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ABSTRACT
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 thatâ„¢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.
INTRODUCTION
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.
A single standard which can provide a simple, flexible, interoperable solution to the problems of indexing, searching and retrieving multimedia resources will be extremely valuable and widely deployed. Resources described using such a standard will acquire enhanced value. Compliant hardware and software tools capable of efficiently generating and interpreting such standardized descriptions will be in great demand.
DIFFERENT VIDEO FORMATS
Avid PC users will almost certainly remember the first time they were able to view a video clip on their computer. The clips were about the size of a postage stamp and were generously referred to as "multimedia". Later, the first acceptable video clips were used in the opening scenes of computer games. In some cases, there were even digital 3D animations that couldn't be created in real-time with the hardware and software that was available in those days. As the video clips demanded extensive storage space (despite their short length), they were only available on CD-ROM drives that had recently become popular. Because of this, many PC's became multimedia-compatible, in a restricted sense, by the integration of a CD-ROM drive and a soundcard. However, their limitations soon became apparent: it wasn't possible to run the video clip smoothly in fullscreen mode even with the most powerful hardware available. With the development of high performance graphic chips, faster processors and corresponding software interfaces, today's users are now able to run video clips in all the usual formats (including fullscreen mode) without problems. We'll continue with a look at the most video formats and we'll then provide an overview of their specific applications.
The AVI Format
One of the oldest formats in the x86 computer world is AVI. The abbreviation 'AVI' stands for 'Audio Video Interlaced'. This video format was created by Microsoft, which was introduced along with Windows 3.1. AVI, the proprietary format of Microsoft's "Video for Windows" application, merely provides a framework for various compression algorithms such as Cinepak, Intel Indeo, Microsoft Video 1, Clear Video or IVI. In its first version, AVI supported a maximum resolution of 160 x 120 pixels with a refresh rate of 15 frames per second. The format attained widespread popularity, as the first video editing systems and software appeared that used AVI by default. Examples of such editing boards included Fast's AV Master and Miro/Pinnacle's DC10 to DC50. However, there were a number of restrictions: for example, an AVI video that had been processed using an AV Master could not be directly processed using an interface board from Miro/Pinnacle. The manufacturers adapted the open AVI format according to their own requirements. AVI is subject to additional restrictions under Windows 98, which make professional work at higher resolutions more difficult. For example, the maximum file size under the FAT16 file system is 2 GB. The FAT32 file system (came with OSR2 and Windows 98) brought an improvement: in connection with the latest DirectX6 module 'DirectShow', files with a size of 8 GB can (at least in theory) be created. In practice however, many interface cards lack the corresponding driver support so that Windows NT 4.0 and NTFS are strongly recommended. Despite its age and numerous problems, the AVI format is still used in semi-professional video editing cards. Many TV cards and graphic boards with a video input also use the AVI format. These are able to grab video clips at low resolutions (mostly 320 x 240 pixels).
Apple's Format
The MOV format which originated in the Macintosh world, was also ported to x86 based PC's. It is the proprietary standard of Apple's Quicktime application that simultaneously stores audio and video data. Between 1993 and 1995, Quicktime was superior to Microsoft's AVI format in both functionality and quality. The functionality of the latest generation (Quicktime 4.0) also includes the streaming of Internet videos (the realtime transmission of videos without the need to first download the entire file to the computer). Despite this, Apple's proprietary format is continually losing popularity with the increasing use of MPEG. Video clips coded with Apple's format are still found on some CD's because of Quicktime's ability to run on both Macintosh and x86 computers.
MPEG Formats
The MPEG formats are by far the most popular standard. MPEG stands for "Motion Picture Experts Group" - an international organization that develops standards for the encoding of moving images. In order to attain widespread use, the MPEG standard only specifies a data model for the compression of moving pictures and for audio signals. In this way, MPEG remains platform independent. One can currently differentiate between four standards: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 und MPEG-7. Let's take a brief look at each format separately.
MPEG-1 was released in 1993 with the objective of achieving acceptable frame rates and the best possible image quality for moving images and their sound signals for media with a low bandwidth (1 MBit/s up to 1,5 MBit/s). The design goal of MPEG-1 is the ability to randomly access a sequence within half a second, without a noticeable loss in quality. For most home user applications (digitizing of vacation videos) and business applications (image videos, documentation), the quality offered by MPEG-1 is adequate.
MPEG-2 has been in existence since 1995 and its basic structure is the same as that of MPEG-1, however it allows data rates up to 100 MBit/s and is used for digital TV, video films on DVD-ROM and professional video studios. MPEG-2 allows the scaling of resolution and the data rate over a wide range. Due to its high data rate compared with MPEG-1 and the increased requirement for memory space, MPEG-2 is currently only suitable for playback in the home user field. The attainable video quality is noticeably better than with MPEG-1 for data rates of approximately 4 MBit/s.
MPEG-4 is one of the latest video formats and its objective is to get the highest video quality possible for extremely low data rates in the range between 10 KBit/s and 1 MBit/s. Furthermore, the need for data integrity and loss-free data transmission is paramount as these play an important role in mobile communications. Something completely new in MPEG-4 is the organization of the image contents into independent objects in order to be able to address or process them individually. MPEG-4 is used for video transmission over the Internet for example. Some manufacturers plan to transmit moving images to mobile phones in the future. MPEG-4 is intended to form a platform for this type of data transfer.
MPEG-7 is the latest MPEG family project. It is a standard to describe multimedia data and can be used independently of other MPEG standards. MPEG-7 will probably reach the status of an international standard by the year 2001.
The MJPEG Format
The abbreviation MJPEG stands for "Motion JPEG". This format is practically an intermediate step between a still image and video format, as an MJPEG clip is a sequence of JPEG images. This is one reason why the format is often implemented by video editing cards and systems. MJPEG is a compression method that is applied to every image. Video editing cards such as Fast's AV Master or Miro's DC50 or the much more inexpensive Matrox Marvel product series reduce the resulting data stream of a standard television signal from approximately 30 MB/s (!) to 6 MB/s (MJPEG file). This corresponds to a compression ratio of 5:1. However, a standard for the synchronization of audio and video data during recording has not been implemented in the MJPEG format so that the manufacturers of video editing cards have had to create their own implementations.
WHAT ARE THE MPEG STANDARDS
The Moving Picture Coding Experts Group (MPEG) is a working group of the Geneva-based ISO/IEC standards organization, (International Standards Organization/International Electro-technical Committee) in charge of the development of international standards for compression, decompression, processing, and coded representation of moving pictures, audio, and a combination of the two. MPEG-7 then is an ISO/IEC standard being developed by MPEG, the committee that also developed the Emmy Award-winning standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and the 1999 MPEG-4 standard.
¢ MPEG-1: For the storage and retrieval of moving pictures and audio on storage media.
¢ MPEG-2: For digital television, it™s the timely response for the satellite broadcasting and cable television industries in their transition from analog to digital formats.
¢ MPEG-4: Codes content as objects and enables those objects to be manipulated individually or collectively on an audiovisual scene.
MPEG-1, -2, and -4 make content available. MPEG-7 lets you to find the content you need.
Besides these standards, MPEG is currently also working in MPEG-21 a Technical Report about Multimedia Framework.
DEFINING MPEG-7
MPEG-7 is a standard for describing features of multimedia content.
Qualifying MPEG-7
MPEG-7 provides the worldâ„¢s richest set of audio-visual descriptions.
These descriptions are based on catalogue (e.g., title, creator, rights), semantic (e.g., the who, what, when, where information about objects and events) and structural (e.g., the colour histogram - measurement of the amount of colour associated with an image or the timbre of an recorded instrument) features of the AV content and leverages on AV data representation defined by MPEG-1, 2 and 4.
Comprehensive Scope of Data Interoperability.
MPEG-7 uses XML Schema as the language of choice for content description MPEG-7 will be interoperable with other leading standards such as, SMPTE Metadata Dictionary, Dublin Core, EBU P/Meta, and TV Anytime.
The Key Role of MPEG-7
MPEG-7, formally named Multimedia Content Description Inter-face, is the standard that describes multimedia content so users can search, browse, and retrieve that content more efficiently and effectively than they could using todayâ„¢s mainly text-based search engines. Itâ„¢s a standard for describing the features of multimedia content.
MPEG-7 will not standardize the (automatic) extraction of AV descriptions/features. Nor will it specify the search engine (or any other program) that can make use of the description. It will be left to the creativity and innovation of search engine companies, for example, to manipulate and massage the MPEG-7-described content into search indices that can be used by their browser and retrieval tools, (see figure 1).
MPEG-7 TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES
It is important to note that MPEG-7 addresses many different applications in many different environments, which means that it needs to provide a flexible and extensible framework for describing audio-visual data. Therefore, MPEG-7 will define a multimedia library of methods and tools. It will standardize:
¢ A set of descriptors: A descriptor (D) is a representation of a feature that defines the syntax and semantics of the feature representation.
¢ A set of description schemes: A description scheme (DS) specifies the structure and semantics of the relationships between its components, which may be both descriptors and description schemes.
¢ A language that specifies description schemes, the Description Definition Language (DDL): It also allows for the extension and modification of existing description schemes. MPEG-7 adopted XML Schema Language as the MPEG-7 DDL. However, the DDL requires some specific extensions to XML Schema Language to satisfy all the requirements of MPEG-7. These extensions are currently being discussed through liaison activities between MPEG and W3C, the group standardizing XML.
Figure 1: The Scope of MPEG-7
¢ One or more ways (textual, binary) to encode descriptions: A coded description is a description that™s been encoded to fulfill relevant requirements such as compression efficiency, error resilience, and random access.
Organization of MPEG-7 Description Tools
Over 100 MPEG-7 Description Tools are currently being developed and refined. The relationships between the MPEG-7 Description Tools are outlined in Figure 2. The basic elements, at the lower level, deal with basic data types, mathematical structures, schema tools, linking and media localization tools, as well as basic DSs, which are elementary components of more complex DSs. The Schema tools section specifies elements for creating valid MPEG-7 schema instance documents and description fragments.
In addition, this section specifies tools for managing and organizing the elements and datatypes of the schema. Based on this lower level, content description and management elements can be defined. These elements describe the content from several viewpoints. Currently five viewpoints are defined: creation and production, media, usage, structural aspects, and conceptual aspects. The first three elements primarily address information thatâ„¢s related to the management of the content (content management), whereas the last two are mainly devoted to the description of perceivable information (content description).
Figure 2: Overview of MPEG-7 Multimedia Description Schemes (DSs)
¢ Creation and Production: Contains meta information that describes the creation and production of the content; typical features include title, creator, classification, and purpose of the creation. Most of the time this information is author-generated since it can™t be extracted from the content.
¢ Usage: Contains meta information that™s related to the usage of the content; typical features involve rights holders, access rights, publication, and financial information. This information may be subject to change during the lifetime of the AV content.
¢ Media: Contains the description of the storage media; typical features include the storage format, the encoding of the AV content, and elements for the identification of the media. Note: Several instances of storage media for the same AV content can be described.
¢ Structural aspects: Contains the description of the AV content from the viewpoint of its structure. The description is structured around segments that represent physical, spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal components of the AV content. Each segment may be described by signal-based features (color, texture, shape, motion, audio) and some elementary semantic information.
¢ Conceptual Aspects: Contains a description of the AV content from the viewpoint of its conceptual notions.
The five sets of Description Tools are presented here as separate entities, however, they are interrelated and may be partially included in each other. For example, Media, Usage or Creation & Production elements can be attached to individual segments involved in the structural description of the content. Tools are also defined for navigation and access and there is another set of tools for Content organization which addresses the organization of content by classification, by the definition of collections and by modeling. Finally, the last set of tools is User Interaction which describes userâ„¢s preferences for the consumption of multimedia content and usage history.
MPEG-7 Working Groups
Currently MPEG-7 concentrates on the specification of description tools (Descriptors and Description Schemes), together with the development of the MPEG-7 reference software, known as XM (eXperimentation Model). The XML Schema Language was chosen as the base for the Description Definition Language (DDL).
The MPEG-7 Audio group develops a range of Description Tools, from generic audio descriptors (e.g., waveform and spectrum envelopes, fundamental frequency) to more sophisticated description tools like Spoken Content and Timbre. Generic Audio Description tools will allow the search for similar voices, by searching similar envelopes and fundamental frequencies of a voice sample against a database of voices. The Spoken Content Description Scheme (DS) is designed to represent the output of a great number of state of the art Automatic Speech Recognition systems, containing both words and phonemes representations and most likely transitions. This alleviates the problem of out-of-vocabulary words, allowing retrieval even when the original word was wrongly decoded. The Timbre descriptors (Ds) describe the perceptual features of instrument sound, that make two sounds having the same pitch and loudness appear different to the human ear. These descriptors allow searching for melodies independently of the instruments.
The MPEG-7 Visual group is developing four groups of description tools: Color, Texture, Shape and Motion. Color and Texture Description Tools will allow the search and filtering of visual content (images, graphics, video) by dominant color or textures in some (arbitrarily shaped) regions or the whole image. Shape Description Tools will facilitate query by sketch or by contour similarity in image databases, or, for example, searching trademarks in registration databases. Motion Description Tools will allow searching of videos with similar motion patterns that can be applicable to news (e.g. similar movements in a soccer or football game) or to surveillance applications (e.g., detect intrusion as a movement towards the safe zone).
The MPEG-7 Multimedia Description Schemes group is developing the description tools dealing with generic and audiovisual and archival features. Its central tools deal with content management and content description as outlined in section 2.1.
The MPEG-7 Implementation Studies group is designing and implementing the MPEG-7 Reference Software known as XM.
The MPEG-7 Systems group is developing the DDL and the binary format (known as BiM), besides working in the definition of the terminal architecture and access units.
MPEG-7 APPLICATION DOMAINS
The elements that MPEG-7 standardizes will support a broad a range of applications (for example, multimedia digital libraries, broadcast media selection, multimedia editing, home entertainment devices, etc.). MPEG-7 will also make the web as searchable for multimedia content as it is searchable for text today. This would apply especially to large content archives, which are being made accessible to the public, as well as to multimedia catalogues enabling people to identify content for purchase. The information used for content retrieval may also be used by agents, for the selection and filtering of broadcasted "push" material or for personalized advertising. Additionally, MPEG-7 descriptions will allow fast and cost-effective usage of the underlying data, by enabling semi-automatic multimedia presentation and editing. All domains making use of multimedia will benefit from MPEG-7 including,
Digital libraries, Education (image catalogue, musical dictionary, Bio-medical imaging catalogues¦)
Multimedia editing (personalised electronic news service, media authoring)
Cultural services (history museums, art galleries, etc.),
Multimedia directory services (e.g. yellow pages, Tourist information, Geographical information systems)
Broadcast media selection (radio channel, TV channel,¦)
Journalism (e.g. searching speeches of a certain politician using his name, his voice or his face)
E-Commerce (personalised advertising, on-line catalogues, directories of e-shops,¦)
Surveillance (traffic control, surface transportation, non-destructive testing in hostile environments, etc.)
Investigation services (human characteristics recognition, forensics)
Home Entertainment (systems for the management of personal multimedia collections, including manipulation of content, e.g. home video editing, searching a game, karaoke,¦)
Social (e.g. dating services)
Typical applications enabled by MPEG-7 technology include:
¢ Audio: I want to search for songs by humming or whistling a tune or, using an excerpt of Pavarotti™s voice, get a list of Pavarotti™s records and video clips in which Pavarotti sings or simply makes an appearance. Or, play a few notes on a keyboard and retrieve a list of musical pieces similar to the required tune, or images matching the notes in a certain way, e.g. in terms of emotions.
¢ Graphics: Sketch a few lines on a screen and get a set of images containing similar graphics, logos, and ideograms.
¢ Image: Define objects, including color patches or textures, and get examples from which you select items to compose your image. Or check if your company logo was advertised on a TV channel as contracted.
¢ Visual: Allow mobile phone access to video clips of goals scored in a soccer game, or automatically search and retrieve any unusual movements from surveillance videos.
¢ Multimedia: On a given set of multimedia objects, describe movements and relations between objects and so search for animations fulfilling the described temporal and spatial relations. Or, describe actions and get a list of scenarios containing such actions.
Examples of MPEG-7 Applications
The following applications are examples of the type of solutions that MPEG-7 can solve. These application examples represent development work in progress. There are many more applications being developed around the world.
Content Retrieval using Image as the Query
Figure 3 shows possible ways to search for visual content using the inherent structural features of an image. In this example there are four image features detailed. The color histogram feature (1) of an image allows me to search for images that have the same color. Note, the position of the colors is not important but rather the amount of similar color in the image is important. The next feature, spatial color distribution (2) allows me to search for images where the location of the same color is important. You can see that the added object in the right-bottom flag does not affect this type of search. You can additionally search for images that have a similar edge or contour profile as in the spatial edge distribution (3) search technique. Note, color does not make a difference to this type of search. Finally, you can see an example of searching by object shape (4). Here, the color and edge profiles are not important.
Figure 3: Search using image features
Movie Tool
This is an MPEG-7 description tool for video with easy-to-use visual interface (see figure 4). It is possible to compose a logical structure of the target content, and to also edit and output an MPEG-7 instance file using this tool. Automatic segmentation of video content is done by detecting scene changes. Manual annotation is also possible to allow users provide additional information about the content. The content is arranged in a hierarchy based on topic and sub-topics where visual clips are summarized using thumbnails. In the ideal world, automatic description and organization of content is most desirable but the variety of possible meanings associated with semantic content make it a difficult task. This Movie Tool, though, helps speed up the manual annotation process because of its friendly visual interface environment. Currently, this tool operates on MPEG-1 input content. Since the logical structure of the content is mapped directly to its MPEG-7 instance in the editor, users can easily see the relationships between content and its related MPEG-7 description. This feature provides is very useful when trying to understand the usage of MPEG-7 description tools and their relationship to content.
Figure 4: Movie Tool
MPEG-7 IN THE 21ST CENTURY MEDIA LANDSCAPE
MPEG-7 is about the future of media in the 21st century. This is not an overstatement. MPEG-7 provides a comprehensive and flexible framework for describing the content of multimedia. To describe content implies knowledge of elements it consists of, as well as, knowledge of interrelations between those elements. The most straightforward application is multimedia management, where such knowledge is prerequisite for efficiency and accuracy. However, there are other serious implications. Knowledge of the structural features of multimedia information as well as its semantic features will help generate solutions that will provide more comprehensive and accurate indexing and search applications, (leading to greater ability for content manipulation, content reuse - and thus new content creation). Many issues, it is true, remain including copyrights issues and interoperability between applications and systems that wish to adhere to the MPEG-7 standard. But such issues are balanced by incredible economical, educational, and ergonomic benefits that will be brought by MPEG-7 technology. Potential concerns will be resolved, and after some years hence, we will not be able to imagine media without MPEG-7 technologies.
ADVANTAGES OF MPEG-7 “ A SUMMARY
1. MPEG Standards have been Successful in the Marketplace.
MPEG standards, to date, have been extremely successful in the marketplace due to MPEG's unique process of sharing leading-edge technology while protecting intellectual property. MPEG-7 builds on the demonstrated success of this process.
2. Taking Advantage of MPEG-7 Expertise
The contributors to MPEG-7 include experts in every portion of the content value chain: production, post-production, delivery, and consumption. Through this process MPEG-7 has standardized description schemes for content description, management, and organization, as well as navigation, access, user preferences and usage history.
3. Interoperability: rapid uptake of MPEG-7, as it is built on enabling technologies and standards.
MPEG-7 is harmonizing with has employed (or has otherwise harmonized with) other standards that have demonstrated success and acceptance in both traditional media and new media businesses, e.g., W3C (XML, XML Schema), IETF (URI, URN, URL), Dublin Core, ISO/ANSI Thesaurus guidelines, SMPTE Metadata Dictionary, TV-Anytime, etc. This will allow rapid integration into your company's products
Various MPEG-2 solutions are looking to MPEG-7 as the standard for specifying additional program metadata. For example, ATSC recently announced an RFP for Metadata for Advance Electronic Program Guide (EPG) Functionality. This request for proposal applies to a protocol for the carriage of metadata in an ATSC MPEG-2-based digital television broadcast stream to support advanced EPG functionality in a DTV receiver. The RFP explicitly states that it is highly desirable that any ATSC standard for enhanced metadata to support advanced EPG features should be harmonized with other standards efforts, such as MPEG-7¦
4. Data Exchange between Subsidiaries
MPEG-7 will enable the content management system at one subsidiary to leverage the content of another subsidiary. For example, broadcasters and content producers could categorize, exchange, process and manage assets across boundaries or along an entire supply chain, e.g., from production house to advertising agency to a broadcasterâ„¢s network.
5. Market Potential for MPEG-7 Applications
According to a Goldman Sachs projection, the market for content management tools will grow from US$378Million in 2000 to US$4.5Billion by 2005. Interoperable tools sell better than non-interoperable tools. MPEG-7 is the gold standard for content management interoperability, not just entertainment companies - but every company, every industry, everywhere.
6. MPEG-7 will enable a New Generation of Multimedia Applications
MPEG-7 uniquely provides comprehensive standardised multimedia description tools for content. Descriptions for the catalogue level (e.g. title), the semantic level (who, what, when, where) and the structural level (spatio-temporal region, color histogram, timbre, texture) will provide tools for creative developers to generate new waves of multimedia applications. Standardized MPEG-7 description tools, then, are a key enabler of the following application domains:
Search Engines, Digital Libraries, Broadcast Networks, Entertainment and News Distributors, Streaming Businesses
Dynamic start-up companies, searching for cutting edge technologies.
Governmental, Educational, Law, Medical & Remedial Services, and Non-profit organizations looking for digital media solutions. For example, the U.S. Library of Congress receives over 10,000 multimedia items each week, and is committed to a) the long term preservation of these multimedia items in digital format, and b) making much of their collection accessible to U.S. citizens in digital format.
XML, Metadata, Modeling/Simulation, & Surveillance Industries.
AI Practitioners, Content Creators and Providers.
7. MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 Tools for Killer Applications
With MPEG-7's sister standard, MPEG-4, an ideal combination is made for solutions that require efficient streaming of content, content manipulation, and indexing and retrieval of that content. In particular mobile application developers have already begun to use these two standards and the trend is set to hugely increase as the demand for visual and audio information services continues to grow.
8. MPEG-7 Intellectual Property and Management Protection
MPEG works closely with representatives of the creative industries to ensure that the best possible protection of the rights of stakeholders is maintained both in content and in metadata
9. MPEG-7 Makes Content More Valuable
Stored audio-visual content, gathered over the years, by broadcasters, libraries, and publishers becomes more valuable because, with MPEG-7 indexing technology, more comprehensive methods are available for users to access and retrieve more detailed descriptions of that content.
10. MPEG-7 provides a seamless path towards increasingly intelligent content management systems
We live in the age of convergence, from the level of production through to distribution and consumption. The technical hardware and communication infrastructure is evolving and will soon reach the point where computing and communications will become embedded in everyday objects and environments. Media will also then become ubiquitous. Ubiquitous media will create a huge demand for new content, and meeting this demand must involve fundamental changes to all stages of media production, management and delivery.
Media archives will become vast and interconnected pools of content, too large to be managed manually. Customization of content within programs, e.g. substitution of structural elements (characters, music, voices) according to viewer desires, content scaling for PDA, cell phones, will be not only possible, but easy and pleasant. MPEG-7 will enable the creation of tools, (through its structured combination of low level features and high-level meta-data), for coping with this "outbreak" of generic content.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
MPEG-7 is intended to describe audiovisual information regardless of storage, coding, display, transmission, medium, or technology. It will address a wide variety of media types including: still pictures, graphics, 3D models, audio, speech, video, and combinations of these (e.g., multimedia presentations). Examples of MPEG-7 data are an MPEG-4 stream, a video tape, a CD containing music, sound or speech, a picture printed on paper, or an interactive multimedia installation on the web.
MPEG-7 will address both retrieval from digital archives (pull applications) as well as filtering of streamed audiovisual broadcasts on the Internet (push applications). It will operate in both real-time and non real-time environments. A "real-time environment" in this context means that the description is generated at the same time as the content is being captured (e.g., smart cameras and scanners).
There are many applications and application domains which will potentially benefit from the MPEG-7 standard. Examples of applications include:
¢ Digital libraries (image catalogue, speech archive);
¢ Broadcast media selection (radio channel, TV channel);
¢ Multimedia editing (personalised electronic news service, media authoring).
The potential applications cover a wide range of domains which include:
¢ Education;
¢ Journalism (e.g., searching speeches of a certain politician using his name, his voice or his face);
¢ Cultural services (museums, art galleries);
¢ Film, Video and Radio archives;
¢ Entertainment (e.g., video-on-demand, searching a game, karaoke);
¢ Investigation services (surveillance, human characteristics recognition, forensics);
¢ Geographical information systems;
¢ Remote sensing (cartography, ecology, natural resources management);
¢ Telemedicine and bio-medical applications.
REFERENCES
(http://cselt.it/mpeg/)
(http://mpeg-7.com)
mpeg-7.com
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. DIFFERENT VIDEO FORMATS
3. WHAT ARE THE MPEG STANDARDS
4. DEFINING MPEG-7
5. MPEG-7 TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES
6. MPEG-7 APPLICATION DOMAINS
7. MPEG-7 IN THE 21ST CENTURY MEDIA LANDSCAPE
8. ADVANTAGES OF MPEG-7 “ A SUMMARY
9. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
10. REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I express my sincere thanks to Prof. M.N Agnisarman Namboothiri (Head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering, MESCE), Mr. Sminesh (Staff incharge) for their kind co-operation for presenting the seminars.
I also extend my sincere thanks to all other members of the faculty of Computer Science and Engineering Department and my friends for their co-operation and encouragement.
AYYAPPA DAS M.R.
