Published on Jun 05, 2023
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. 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.
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).
