Multimedia descriptions based on MPEG-7: Extraction and applications

The amount of digital multimedia content available to consumers is growing because of the existence of digital capturing devices such as digital cameras, camcorders and the advent of digital video broadcast. With this increase in content, it becomes important for users to be able to browse and search for content in a timely manner. Descriptions and annotations of the content are needed to enable searching and browsing of content. MPEG-7 is a recent ISO standard for multimedia content description. In this paper, we present three descriptors, which we had proposed to MPEG-7, and have been accepted to the standard. In addition, we describe algorithms for automatically extracting these descriptors. We also present the indexing and retrieval algorithms that we developed for these descriptors; these algorithms are fast and scalable for large databases. The results presented in the paper for image and video segment matching using these descriptors show their usefulness in real applications.