An efficient metadata description scheme in a visual information repository system based on MPEG-7 and dublin core

Abstract

With the continuing explosion of multimedia information in today``s society, searching for information contents of interest is becoming more demanded. Among various media types, visual(i.e.,image and video) data are increasingly popular with Internet users and yet difficult to manipulate due to its data size and representation diversity. The recent multimedia application trend has shown that visual data services for content-based data search and more sophisticated data representation are increasingly demanded by Internet users. Search for images and video fames of interest by specifying contents description and representation requires an accurate metadata modeling scheme and ease-of-use querying mechanism. Metadata management of visual information poses many interesting and challenging problems. The traditional textual annotation-based approach to describe visual contents faces two major problems, the laborious manual annotation process and the subjectivity of human perception due to the richness of multimedia contents. Perceptual subjectivity and impresise annotation process may cause a highly inaccurate data search and retrieval. To overcome these problems, content-based retreival schemes were proposed in the early 90``s. Instead of using manual and textual annotations, they use automatic feature extraction techniques based on color, texture, shape, etc. Despite a variety of researches and developments in this direction, they faces another problem of technical complexity, performance, and non-uniformity. the recently started international metadata standard activity attempts to standardize visual data description schemes to solve the problems. The activities intend to provide a set of internationally standardized metadata description scheme, which describes multimedia contents for indexing and searching in a highly structured manner. There are two cardinal metadata description standards, Dublin core for the legacy metadata description for textual documents...