MPEG is continuing to work on MPEG-7 to define new Descriptors and Description Schemes and to complete the specification of MPEG-7 conformance. MPEG is also working to amend the MPEG-2 standard to allow carriage of MPEG-7 descriptions within MPEG-2 streams. An MPEG-7 industry focus group has also been formed to bring together organizations interested in development and deployment of MPEG-7 systems and solutions.
With the growing interest in digital video, efficient and effective systems are needed for video indexing and retrieval. The recently developed MPEG-7 standard provides a standardized metadata system for describing video content using XML. In this paper, we investigated the application of MPEG-7 for indexing and retrieval of video and discussed example instances of MPEG-7 description tools. We showed that MPEG-7 tools can be used to provide rich description of video content in terms of shot boundaries & key-frames, textual annotations and transcriptions, features, semantics, and models. These aspects allow for video searching based on rich description of content and can be used together in an integrated fashion for effective indexing and retrieval of video.