From MPEG-4 scene representation to MPEG-7 description

This chapter introduces the first online MAMS (Multimedia Asset Management System) synergistically developed around MPEG-4/MPEG-7 standards. We show how this combination solves the main challenges for any MAMS with respect to multimedia compression, representation, description as well as user-interactivity. MPEG-4 can be used as a unique solution for storage and presentation of image, audio, video and 2D/3D graphics. Moreover, the basic MPEG-4 components (e.g. the elements of scene graphs) are easily extracted by bitstream parsing and exploited for completing the MPEG-7 content description schema. The solution we provide is open to third party descriptor extractors; with this purpose, a developer API (Application Programming Interface) grants access to decoded media and to the instantiation of the descriptors. The practical validation is achieved by an online MAMS devoted to the indexation of 3D graphics objects corresponding to large and heterogeneous databases.