MPEG-7. Describing the multimedia..................
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MPEG-7: The Digital Content Platform Standard
New Standard Will Aid Asset Management And Multimedia Content
By Lou CasaBianca
The committee that developed the Emmy Award-winning standards known as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4, is now discussing MPEG-7 and its definitions. MPEG-7 is an ISO/IEC (International Standards Organization/ International Engineering Consortium) standard developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards made interactive video on CD-ROM and Digital Television possible. MPEG-4 provides the standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution, and content access paradigms for digital television, interactive graphics, and interactive multimedia (DVD).
Now, MPEG-7-officially called the "Multimedia Content Description Interface"-aims to create a standard for describing the multimedia content data that will support the interpretation of the information's meaning, which can then be passed onto, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. MPEG-7 is not limited at any one media type in particular. Instead, the elements that the MPEG-7 standard includes will support as broad a range of applications as possible. Both SMPTE and AES are adapting this standard for their respective organizations and technology focus.
The Internet and the approaching widespread availability of broadband, cellular and wireless spectrum will enable the ability to deliver massive amounts of audio-visual content, from many sources, anywhere in the world. In particular, digital media will be delivered as still pictures, graphics, 3D-models, audio, animation, digital and streaming video, and HDTV.
Increasingly, any relevant recorded media, such as audio, film, or video, is originated or converted to digital. Driven by powerful computational systems, an escalating number of advanced networks and storage applications can now watch, listen to, and filter audio-visual information, dynamically creating, exchanging, retrieving, re-using, and syndicating digital content.
The types of scenarios supported and enabled by MPEG-7 include image recognition (intelligent vision, smart cameras, image search, etc.), media conversion (speech to text, picture to speech, speech to picture, etc.), information retrieval (quickly and efficiently searching for various types of multimedia content), and filtering (to capture multimedia data which meet the user's preferences) in a stream of audio-visual content.
For example, coding in a television program triggers a suitably programmed VCR or server to record that program, or an image sensor triggers an alert to notify a production assistant when a certain visual event happens and sends that content to the recorder. Automatic transcoding may be performed from a string of characters or audible information or a search may be performed on a stream of audio or video data. In each case, the audio-visual information has been suitably "encoded" to enable a device or a computer code to take some action.
The increasingly pervasive role of digital media and Internet content in business, entertainment, and education-and the growing requirement to have these sources further processed-make it necessary to develop forms of content representation that go beyond simple waveform or sample-based, frame-based (such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) or even object-based such as MPEG-4) formats.
MPEG-7 enables embedding of the information's meaning (metadata), which can be passed onto, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. In the examples above, an image sensor may produce visual data not in the form of PCM samples (pixels values) but in the form of objects with associated physical measures and time information. These could then be stored and processed to enable interactivity and e-commerce.
A VCR could receive descriptions of the program's content that would enable it to record, for example, only technology news with the exclusion of all other kinds of news. Products and services can be described in such a way that a machine/device/set-top box could respond to unstructured queries from customers making inquiries.
So, MPEG-7 aims to create a standard for describing the multimedia content data that will support these operational requirements. It's not aimed at any one application in particular; rather, the elements that MPEG-7 standardizes are structured to support as broad a range of applications as possible.
The abstract above explains a hypothetical MPEG-7 chain in practice. The square boxes depict tools that are doing things-such as encoding or decoding-whereas the circular boxes represent static elements (such as a description). The dotted boxes in the figure encompass the normative elements of the MPEG-7 standard.
More information about this critical new standard can be found at MPEG's website (www.mpeg.org), which contains links to additional research, publicly available documents, and links to other MPEG-7 Web pages. |
