Using Software Agents with MPEG-7 Descriptions for a Distribute Flexible Multimedia System

Distributed Multimedia & its applications are evolving day by day. However, the issues of limited transmission bandwidth, network reliability, QoS, and flexibility are not yet completely resolved. On the other hand, the www is growing at a rapid pace and a huge amount of new multimedia data is introduced everyday. This data includes downloadable and stream-able multimedia content. To enhance the streaming quality with the available bandwidths, several new codecs and standards are under development. This paper initially discusses the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards for streaming and description of multimedia content respectively and proposes an agent based architecture to introduce a distributed flexible scheme to query, search, filter, and gather results using the multimedia content descriptions as provided by the MPEG-7 standard. A resource agent has been used to convert the multimedia content descriptions of MPEG-7 to a local XML repository, so that efficient query and platform independence can be achieved.