Interoperable Content-based Access of Multimedia in Digital Libraries (invited talk)

Recent academic and commercial efforts in digital libraries have demonstrated the significant potential for largescale, on-line search and retrieval of cataloged multimedia content. By improving access to scientific, educational, and historical documents and information, digital libraries create powerful opportunities for revamping education, accelerating scientific discovery and technical advancement, and improving knowledge. Furthermore, digital multimedia libraries go well beyond traditional libraries in storing and indexing diverse and complex types of material consisting of images, video, graphics, audio and multimedia. In this paper, we examine several challenges addressed by MPEG-7 for enabling network-based digital multimedia libraries to interoperate with diverse networked multimedia systems and allow universal access to widely distributed multimedia content. MPEG-7 provides a framework for self-describing digital multimedia that uses a common vocabulary to describe the features, semantics, structure and models of audio-visual content. We describe how MPEG-7 can be used to enable interoperable content-based searching, indexing, filtering and browsing of multimedia in digital libraries. We also examine the MPEG-7 application of Universal Multimedia Access, which involves the scalable or adaptive delivery of multimedia content to patrons of digital libraries regardless of capabilities of terminal device, conditions of communication bandwidth, or client support for media formats and modalities.