The MPEG-7 Visual Descriptors: A Basic Survey

The enormous growth of stored images in the Internet creates a new and unexpected opportunity for the advancement of science and technology. However, to make an optimal use of this tremendous volume of information, substantial progress is required in the way that current computers process images. There are several efforts in this direction, one of which is to standardize the whole process, thus emerging the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). In this paper we introduce the MPEG-7 standard, and present and analyze some representative works of the state of the art in this area, with emphasis on Visual Descriptors for Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), and finally discuss some trends.