MPEG-7 Library

Purpose

The MPEG-7 library is a set of C++ classes, implementing the MPEG-7 standard (ISO/IEC 15938:2001 and 15938:2004). With this library application developers are able to create multimedia content descriptions, manipulate them, serialize them to XML and de-serialize them – with validation – from XML. The library is available as source release and as binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. One major design goal was to simplify extending single classes to allow the developer to enrich interface functionality for certain descriptors. Furthermore, documentation on concept and source code level improves the learning curve for the programmer. The library contains data structures for representing, accessing and modifying descriptors and description schemes and provides tools for parsing, serializing descriptions. It does not contain feature extractors.

Benefits

All application developers who want to deal with MPEG-7 metadata and who do not want to struggle with complex XML DOM programming will benefit from our solution. MPEG-7 metadata, which are stored in a hierarchical XML representation, are made available for developers in an object oriented hierarchical class tree. The MPEG-7 library avoids the time consuming task of implementing hundreds of necessary MPEG-7 classes before implementation of MPEG-7 functionality can start. The C++ implementation provides optimal performance for accessing MPEG-7 XML descriptions.

From version 2.0 on, the MPEG-7 library includes a great new feature: You cannot only use XPath for accessing nodes, but also create parts of your description by using an XPath statement. This makes coding more efficient and reduces the amount of code for creating description by about 40%.

Documentation

A detailed description of our MPEG-7 library including some programming examples can be downloaded here:

pdf  Mp7Jrs2.7.1.pdf

The library is described in the following publication: Werner Bailer, Hermann Fürntratt, Peter Schallauer, Georg Thallinger and Werner Haas, “A C++ Library for Handling MPEG-7 Descriptions,” in Proceedings of ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, Nov. 2011, pp. 731-734.