MPEG-7 Technology
Background
MPEG-7 is the 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 with its content. MPEG-7 is not an alternative to any of the MPEG standards used for compression but complementing them and providing video with "meaning", in the form of standardized video annotations as metadata.
The Eptascape video analytics platform is using MPEG-7 to annotate video captured from surveillance cameras to then use these annotations for scene analysis and automatic interpretation. In the Eptascape analytics platform, video content extraction is separated from its interpretation and MPEG-7 is the formalism used to transfer the result of the content extraction in the form of video annotations, to the interpretation component.
Use in Surveillance
MPEG-7 has a very wide range of applications in video surveillance as its XML-based encoding is used for the scene description. Meaningful objects in the scene are automatically extracted in the encoding process and their physical properties such as position, speed, shape, color are available as XML tags at the receiving end.
Preventive video surveillance tasks like objects left or removed, trespassing, tail-gating, or people counting can be notably facilitated and automated by using the object-based textual description generated by MPEG-7 encoding. Events are automatically detected by processing relevant object parameters in the back-end, such as a person position to determine trespassing.
Moving the key processing for video analysis as an independent task, creates unlimited scalability and highly cost-effective implementation, including inside network edge devices.
MPEG-7 Encoder Software
In the Eptascape video analytics platform, the MPEG-7 encoder is the software 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.
Privacy protection mask
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.
The Eptascape MPEG-7 encoder is a software component available both embedded in dedicated hardware using DSP for real-time encoding and as a software module for the MS-Windows and Linux platforms.
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 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
