MPEG-7 in Video Surveillance

MPEG-7 is the emerging international standard for "Multimedia Content Description"and it has been ratified by ISO in 2001. Unlike the more popular MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, MPEG-7 is not concerned with video compression and reproduction but its content. In fact, MPEG-7 is not replacing any of the standards used for compression but complementing them with "meaning" in the form of standardized annotations as metadata.

The Eptascape analytics platform is using MPEG-7 as a way to analyze video captured from surveillance cameras to detect for relevant events in real-time. In the Eptascape platform video content analysis is separated from its interpretation and MPEG-7 is the formalism used to transfer the result of the analysis in the form of annotations, to the interpretation component.

In the Eptascape video analytics platform, the MPEG-7 encoder is software embedded within compatible video content analysis units that generate MPEG-7 metadata (annotations) of video in real-time. These metadata describe visual characteristics of relevant objects, tracking them as they move through the scene.

Examples of "object descriptors" extracted by the MPEG-7 encoder are the shape or contour, the color, and the texture. Each object is tagged with a unique ID and its position is tracked using the centroid descriptor.

Separating the video content analysis from its interpretation and representing video content in a standard format, has the advantage that the results of the challenging and compute intensive video analysis are independent from any specific application. The same analysis used for instance to detect specific events in the scene by performing behavioral analysis can be used for indexing video or perform camera object tracking.

Check the Eptacam MPEG-7 camera concept ...

More reading

Read about MPEG-7 on Wikipedia. For a more technical description read the MPEG-7 Overview by ISO (ISO/IEC 15938-3 standard).

MPEG-7: Security industry's best kept secret? in August 2007 issue of Security Systems News.

Read the paper "The MPEG-7 Visual Standard for Content Description. An Overview", by Thomas Sikora, former chairman of the ISO-MPEG video group.