MPEG-7 Systems: overview

This paper gives an overview of Part 1 of ISO/IEC 15939 (MPEG-7 Systems). It first presents the objectives of the MPEG-7 Systems activity. In the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards, “Systems” referred only to overall architecture, multiplexing, and synchronization. In MPEG-4, in addition to these issues, the Systems part encompasses interactive scene description, content description, and programmability. MPEG-7 brings new challenges to the Systems expertise, such as languages for description representation, binary representation of descriptions, and delivery of descriptions either separate or jointly with the audio–visual content. The paper then presents the description of the MPEG-7 Systems specification, starting from the general architecture up to the description of the individual MPEG-7 Systems tools. Finally, a conclusion describes the status of the standardization effort, as well as future extensions of the specification.