Survey of MPEG‐7 Applications in the Multimedia Lifecycle

The ever‐growing increase of digital multimedia content by commercial as well as by user driven content providers necessitates intelligent content description formats supporting an efficient navigation, search and retrieval in large multimedia content repositories. Besides the well known multimedia standards (MPEG‐1, MPEG‐2 and MPEG‐4), the MPEG consortium also established a metadata (data about data) standard (called MPEG‐7) for describing multimedia content. Currently, this international standard is probably the richest multimedia metadata set available. In the past, a lot of research has been accomplished on MPEG‐7 based technologies. In this context, this chapter surveys the use of MPEG‐7 in the application domain of an end‐to‐end search and retrieval scenario. Within this, current state of the art applications are investigated that support the production of MPEG‐7 annotations. Based on the extracted metadata, available MPEG‐7 database products are highlighted that enable a standardized navigation and search in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. Especially, the novel MPEG Query Format (part 12 of the MPEG‐7 standard) and its applications are addressed. Related to this, MPEG‐7 based middleware products are introduced. At the bottom line of our end‐to‐end scenario, MPEG‐7 based user tools and front‐end environments are emphasized with a detailed view to applications in the mobile domain.