Multimedia content description in the InfoPyramid

There is a growing need for developing a content description language for multimedia that improves searching. indexing and managing of the multimedia content. The MPEG group recendy established the MPEG-7 effort to standardize the multimedia content interface. The proposed interface will bridge the gap between various types of content meta-data, such as content features, annotations, relationships, and the search engines. In this paper. we develop a method of handling multimedia content description in a new multi-abstraction, multi-modal content representation framework called the InfoPyramid. The InfoPyramid facilitates the search, retrieval. manipulation, and transmission of multimedia data by providing a hierarchy for content descriptors. We illustrate the suitability of the InfoPyramid multimedia content description to MPEG-7 by examining four multimedia retrieval applications: a Web-image search engine. a satellite image retrieval system. an Internet content delivery system. and a TV news storage and retrieval system.