MPEG-21: Goals and Achievements

MPEG-21 is an open standards-based framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. It aims to enable the use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices. We discuss MPEG-21's parts, achievements, ongoing activities, and opportunities for new technologies. Publication Details This article was originally published as: Burnett, I, Van de Walle, R, Hill, K et al, MPEG-21 Goals and Achievements, IEEE Multimedia, Oct-Dec 2003, 10(4), 60-70. Copyright IEEE 2003. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/46 MPEG-21 is an open standards-based framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. It aims to enable the use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices. In this article, we discuss MPEG-21’s parts, achievements, ongoing activities, and opportunities for new technologies. T he appetite for content consumption and easier access to information continues to increase rapidly. Access devices are also evolving so that we have a wide choice of terminal and network capabilities. The result is that people, both in their personal and professional lives, are increasingly creators as well as consumers of digital media. They thus demand solutions that deliver accessible and advanced multimedia creation and consumption on many platforms. These new content providers and the traditional media sources share a core set of concerns: management of content, repurposing content based on user preferences and device capabilities, protection of rights, protection from unauthorized access/ modification, protection of privacy of providers and consumers, and so on. The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework initiative aims to meet these challenges by enabling the use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices. In this article, we discuss MPEG-21, an open standards-based framework for multimedia delivery and consumption by all the players in the delivery and consumption chain. MPEG-21 context MPEG-21 is the newest of a series of standards being produced by the Moving Picture Experts Group (see http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com), more formally known as ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG11. MPEG has a long history of producing multimedia standards: MPEG-1 (1993), MPEG-2 (1996), MPEG-4 (1999), and MPEG-7 (2001). MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 resulted in many successful commercial products and services, such as video-CD, DVD, digital television, digital audio broadcasting (DAB), and MP3 (MPEG-1/-2 audio layer 3). More recently, MPEG-41 standardized audio– visual coding solutions that address the needs of communication, interactive and broadcasting services, and many combinations of these models. At the heart of MPEG-4 technology is an object-based representation approach in which a scene is modeled as a composition of both natural and synthetic objects with which a user may interact. Through this new coding approach, MPEG-4 creates new opportunities for users to play with, create, reuse, access, and consume audio–visual content. MPEG-4 is currently used on the Internet (such as Quicktime 6) and is being adopted in several other communications contexts. Building on MPEG-4’s object-based vision, the MPEG-72 standard concentrates on the description of multimedia content. It enables quick and efficient searching, identification, processing, and filtering of multimedia material. This lets users (both humans and machines) use and interact with non-text-based multimedia content directly and efficiently. Together, the MPEG-1, -2, -4, and -7 standards provide a complete, powerful, and successful set of tools for multimedia representation. Other multimedia-related standards (and proprietary solutions) exist, such as JPEG and JPEG 2000. However, widespread deployment of multimedia applications requires more than this loose collection of standards. The problem is that overall multimedia consumption and commerce remain nontransparent and aren’t happening on a large scale. In late 1999 and early 2000, MPEG examined several questions: Do all existing multimedia-related standard specifications fit together? Does anybody know how they fit together? Do we have specifications for all the 6