Introduction to MPEG-7: Multimedia Content Description Interface [ハードカバー]

MPEG-1,2,and 4 make multimedia content available, while MPEG-7 makes content accessible, retrievable, and filterable. This book is all about the MPEG-7 standard, its implementation, and its applications. The book is divided into six sections which I describe as follows:
Section 1, the introduction, introduces the MPEG-7 standard, history, and its motivation.
Section 2, "Systems", covers system architecture, the description definition language (MPEG-7 is expressed in XML), and the binary format for MPEG-7.
Section 3, "Multimedia Description Schemes", describes the organization of multimedia features that can be described with MPEG-7. This section shows how search, retrieval, filtering, navigation, and browsing are supported by certain MPEG-7 tools. The next two sections are the most fascinating for people involved in multimedia description and retrieval.
Section 4, "Visual Descriptors", discusses how MPEG-7 can describe visual components of images and video for efficient retrieval. Color is described in multimedia via color histograms, dominant color, and color layout. There are also texture descriptors as well as shape descriptors and motion descriptors all present in MPEG-7 to "describe" visual information.
Section 5, "Audio Descriptors", likewise, describes how audio can be indexed via specific descriptors of its content that are far less obvious than those for vision. These include automatic speech recognition techniques, finding spectral similarities, and the use of hidden Markov models. The descriptors are both high and low level. Low level descriptors use the power and the spectrum of the audio signal for data matching and description. High-level tools include melody descriptions in the case of music, recognition of words spoken, log attack time, and even "query by humming".
Section 6, "Applications", shows applications for MPEG-7 that are broadly classified into search/browsing applications and mobile applications. The browsing applications mentioned include real time video retrieval, browsing TV news broadcasts, and audio music retrieval.
A DVD is included that contains technical reports, working demos, and the official MPEG-7 reference software. The DVD demos include using MPEG-7 for video browsing and also searching for images using texture as a descriptor.
The tone of the book is academic, but there are many examples in the book that really clarify the use and expression of the standard. I recommend it to anyone interested in MPEG-7. To get the most out of the book you should already be familiar with XML, information storage and retrieval techniques, and the field of computer vision. Due to the diverse background required to really understand the book, I wouldn't let the low Amazon sales rank scare you - it really is a five star book on the subject! Also, notice that used copies can be found on Amazon Marketplace for a fraction of what a new book costs.