MPEG7 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. MPEG7 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.
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. MPEG7 wants to answer to this need, providing this solution.