A MPEG-4/7 based Internet Video and Still Image Browsing System

The ongoing MPEG-7 standard intends to provide a “Multimedia Content Description Interface.” In other words, it will provide a rich set of tools to describe content with a view to facilitating applications such as content based querying, browsing and searching of multimedia content. The MPEG-4 standard provides tools for compressing multimedia content at bitrates that are feasible with typical internet connections. Such bitrates fall significantly short of those supported by prior standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Thus, in this paper, we present a remote video and still image browsing system that uses MPEG-7 for the querying/browsing/searching and MPEG-4 for compressing any transmitted content. We use descriptors of features such as color, shape and motion to annotate the stored content with MPEG-7 like metadata. The aforementioned descriptors stem from our previous work and are currently in the working draft of the MPEG-7 standard. In our previous work, we have shown the efficacy of each of the descriptors individually. In this paper, we show how we combine some of the features to effectively browse remote video and still image content. Our emphasis is on accurate and quick browsing of the remote content. Our system consists of a video web server with stored MPEG-4 video/still content that is able to support remote requests through a simple browser interface. We have used a combination of cgi script and servletapplet based configurations. We will present a demonstration of our system at the conference. We have already successfully demonstrated it to the Japanese press.