Frequently Asked Questions

MPEG-7 will be a standardized description of various types of multimedia information. This description will be associated with the content itself, to allow fast and efficient searching for material that is of interest to the user. MPEG-7 is formally called ‘Multimedia Content Description Interface’.

The standard does not comprise the (automatic) extraction of descriptions/features. Nor does it specify the search engine (or any other program) that can make use of the description.

The demand logically follows the increasing availability of digital audiovisual content. MPEG members recognized this demand, and initiated a new work item. There are many applications and application domains which will benefit from the MPEG-7 standard. A few application examples are:

• Digital libraries (image catalogue, musical dictionary,…)
• Multimedia directory services (e.g. yellow pages)
• Broadcast media selection (radio channel, TV channel,…)
• Multimedia editing (personalised electronic news service, media authoring)

The potential applications are spread over the following application domains:

• Education,
• Journalism (e.g. searching speeches of a certain politician using his name, his voice or his face),
• Tourist information,
• Cultural services (history museums, art galleries, etc.),
• Entertainment (e.g. searching a game, karaoke),
• Investigation services (human characteristics recognition, forensics),
• Geographical information systems,
• Remote sensing (cartography, ecology, natural resources management, etc.),
• Surveillance (traffic control, surface transportation, non-destructive testing in hostile environments, etc.),
• Bio-medical applications,
• Shopping (e.g. searching for clothes that you like),
• Architecture, real estate, and interior design,
• Social (e.g. dating services), and
• Film, Video and Radio archives.

Nowadays, more and more audiovisual information is available, from many sources around the world. Also, there are people who want to use this audiovisual information for various purposes. However, before the information can be used, it must be located. At the same time, the increasing availability of potentially interesting material makes this search more difficult. This challenging situation led to the need of a solution to the problem of quickly and efficiently searching for various types of multimedia material interesting to the user. MPEG-7 wants to answer to this need, providing this solution.

The way MPEG-7 data will be used to answer user queries is outside the scope of the standard. In principle, any type of AV material may be retrieved by means of any type of query material. This means, for example, that video material may be queried using video, music, speech, etc. It is to the search engine to match the query data and the MPEG-7 AV description. A few query examples are:

The people taking part in defining MPEG-7 represent broadcasters, equipment manufacturers, digital content creators and managers, transmission providers, publishers and intellectual property rights managers, as well as university researchers.

The standardization of audiovisual content recognition tools is beyond the scope of MPEG-7. Following its principle ‘specifying the minimum for maximum usability, MPEG-7 will concentrate on standardizing a representation that can be used for description. Development of audiovisual content recognition tools will be a task for industries which will build and sell MPEG-7 enabled products.

In developing the standard, however, MPEG might build some coding tools, just as it did with the predecessors of MPEG-7, namely MPEG-1, -2 and -4. Also for these standards, coding tools were built for research purposes, but they did not become part of the standard itself.

In the same way that MPEG will not standardize the tools to generate the description, MPEG-7 will also not standardize the tools that use the description. It might however be necessary to address the interface between the description and the search engine.

The words ‘descriptions’ or ‘features’ represent a rich concept, that can be related to several levels of abstraction. Descriptions vary according to the types of data. Furthermore, different types of descriptions are necessary for different purposes of the categorization.

The descriptions that conform to the MPEG-7 standard could be entered by hand, but they could also be automatically extracted. Some features can be best extracted automatically (color, texture), but for some other features (‘this scene contains three shoes and that music was recorded in 1995’) this is very hard or even impossible.

You can start by taking a look at MPEG's home page (http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/) which contains many useful references, including more lists with "Frequently Asked Questions" about MPEG activities.

You can contact any of the people listed below with their email addresses and telephone numbers. To visit MPEG meetings you need to be on your national delegation, but the people listed below can explain how this works.