The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is developing a new standard called the “Multimedia Content Description Interface" also known as MPEG-7. The goal of MPEG-7 is to enable fast and effective searching and filtering of multimedia content. The effort is being driven by requirements taken from a large number of applications related to multimedia databases, interactive media services (music, TV pro-grams), video libraries, and so forth. MPEG-7 is achieving this goal by developing an XML-Schema based standard for describing features of multimedia content. In this tutorial, we study the emerging MPEG-7 standard and describe the new challenges for MPEG-7 multimedia databases.The ultimate goal and objective of MPEG-7 is to provide interoperability among systems and applications, used in management, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual content descriptions. Such descriptions of streamed or stored media help users or applications to identify, retrieve, or filter audio-visual information. Examples of applications include broadcast media selection.
