Visual annotation tool for multimedia content description

In this paper, we describe a multimedia annotation tool that allows the users to interactively create MPEG-7 descriptions. The MPEG-7 standard provides description structures for multimedia content in the form of Description Schemes (DS) and Descriptors with the goal of enabling interoperable searching and filtering. The MPEG-7 Visual Annotation Tool allows the user to manually link together MPEG-7 DSs and Descriptors as needed and enter description data into the fields of the description structures. The tool takes as input an MPEG-7 Schema definition file and an MPEG-7 package description file. The MPEG-7 Schema definition file defines the structure of the MPEG-7 description components using the MPEG-7 Description Definition Language (DDL). The Package description file organizes the MPEG-7 description components in order to improve the ease of navigation in the MPEG-7 Visual Annotation Tool. The tool provides utilities for drag-and-drop copying and re-using of description elements and allows the output of the descriptions in XML to files. The initial implementation centers around manual entry of description data, however, in future work we plan to explore the integration of automatic and semi-automatic feature extraction methods with the goal of providing a complete system for MPEG-7 multimedia content annotation and query construction.