Abstract
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. All rights reserved. MPEG-7, formally called ISO/IEC 15938 Multimedia Content Description Interface, is an international standard aimed at providing an interoperable solution to the description of various types of multimedia content, irrespective of their representation format. It is quite different from standards such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, which aim to represent the content itself, since MPEG-7 aims to represent information about the content, known as metadata, so as to allow users to search, identify, navigate and browse audio-visual content more effectively. The MPEG-7 standard provides not only elementary visual and audio descriptors, but also multi-media description schemes, which combine the elementary audio and visual descriptors, a description definition language (DDL), and a binary compression scheme for the efficient compression and transportation of MPEG-7 metadata. In addition, reference software and conformance testing information are also part of the MPEG-7 standard and provide valuable tools to the development of standard-compliant systems.