Overview
ISO/IEC 15938-3:2002/Amd 1:2004 is the first amendment to the MPEG-7 Visual component of the ISO/IEC 15938 multimedia content description standard. It extends Part 3 (Visual) by adding visual extensions - new descriptor containers, supporting tools, and formalized syntaxes. The amendment specifies normative syntax using the Description Definition Language (DDL) and defines binary representations and semantics for visual description tools used to annotate still images, video and 3D models.
Key topics and technical requirements
- Visual description toolset: Extensions cover descriptors and supporting tools in five feature categories - Color, Texture, Shape, Motion, Localization - plus face-recognition descriptors.
- Supporting and container tools: Adds and formalizes containers and helpers such as GridLayout, TimeSeries, GofGopFeature (Group-of-Frames/Group-of-Pictures), MultipleView, Spatial2DcoordinateSystem, TemporalInterpolation.
- Color and illumination support: New or extended color descriptors (e.g., DominantColor, ScalableColor, ColorLayout, ColorStructure, ColorTemperature, IlluminationInvariantColor, GoFGoPColor) and supporting tools (ColorSpace, ColorQuantization) to enable illumination-invariant matching and group/frame aggregation.
- Texture, shape and motion descriptors: Texture (HomogeneousTexture, EdgeHistogram, TextureBrowsing), shape (RegionShape, ContourShape, ShapeVariation, Shape3D) and motion (CameraMotion, MotionTrajectory, ParametricMotion, MotionActivity).
- Localization and face tools: RegionLocator and SpatioTemporalLocator for ROI annotation; FaceRecognition and AdvancedFaceRecognition for face-based matching.
- DDL and binary syntax: Normative DDL definitions and a generic binary representation classification scheme (MPEG7… codec terms) are provided, including assignment of descriptor IDs and binary field formats (examples: GofGopFeature binary syntax and fields).
- Interoperability constraints: The amendment enumerates which descriptor types are allowed within containers (e.g., GofGopFeature supports DominantColor, ColorLayout, EdgeHistogram, HomogeneousTexture) and reserves ID ranges for future use.
Applications and users
- Applications: Content-based image/video indexing, similarity search, multimedia asset management, video summarization, surveillance analytics, face-based retrieval, 3D model indexing, and cross-frame feature aggregation.
- Who uses it: Standards implementers, MPEG-7 library and codec developers, multimedia search engine vendors, video analytics researchers, digital library architects and software vendors integrating visual-descriptor interoperability.
Related standards
- ISO/IEC 15938-3 (Visual - base)
- ISO/IEC 15938-1 (system and codec configuration)
- ISO/IEC TR 15938-8 and its amendment (extraction and use of MPEG-7 descriptions)
Keywords: ISO/IEC 15938-3, MPEG-7 Visual, visual descriptors, GofGopFeature, DDL, binary representation, color descriptors, texture descriptors, motion descriptors, multimedia metadata.
Open preview (PDF)Information technology — Multimedia content description interface — Part 3: Visual — Amendment 1: Visual extensions
