The MPEG-7 Description Standard1
Nina Jaunsen Dept of Information and Media Science University of Bergen, Norway September 2004
The increasing use of multimedia in the general society and the need for user-friendly effective multimedia retrieval systems are indisputable. The fact that effective retrieval is reliant on complete and thorough description (among other things) is also fairly agreed upon. Various standards for the description of multimedia are being developed and some exist already. Typically such standards tend to be specialised for certain applications or domains leaving only a few representing general-purpose multimedia description. As of today, the MPEG-7 seems to be recognised as the most complete general-purpose description standard for multimedia. Whether the MPEG-7 multimedia description standard qualifies as an appropriate general-purpose description standard and is compliant with the requirements of such a standard is a discussion beyond the scope of this thesis. MPEG-7 is an ISO/IEC (International Standards Organization/International Electro-technical Committee) approved standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group), a working group developing international standards for compression, decompression, processing, and coded representation of audio-visual data. The standard was initialised in 1996 and it represents a continuously evolving framework for standardising multimedia content description. In the context of this thesis the proposed MPEG-7 standard represents an assessment and basis for evaluation of a general MIRS’ ability to adequately, according to the standard, describe image-media content applied in a digital museum context. The following review of the MPEG-7 standard is based on MPEG-7 documentation (2003) and is merely intended to provide an overview of the standard and to emphasise the image- media specific descriptive elements.
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This paper is part of a master’s thesis in Information Science at the University...