MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION DESCRIPTION SCHEME, METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR MPEG-7

• US 20090157736A1
• Filed: 02/17/2009
• Published: 06/18/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/01/1999
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property II LP (AT&T, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.), Trustees Of Columbia University In The City Of New York (Columbia University)
• Inventors: Benitez, Ana Belen, Chang, Shih-Fu, Huang, Qian, Puri, Atul, Paek, Seungyup
• Granted Patent: US 7,970,822 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/41 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/48 Retrieval characterised by using metadata, e.g. metadata not derived from the content or metadata generated manually
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/489 using time information
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/71 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/84 Mapping; Conversion
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9024 Graphs; Linked lists G06F16/9027 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99948 Application of database or data structure, e.g. distributed, multimedia, or image

Abstract

The invention provides a system and method for integrating multimedia descriptions in a way that allows humans, software components or devices to easily identify, represent, manage, retrieve, and categorize the multimedia content. In this manner, a user who may be interested in locating a specific piece of multimedia content from a database, Internet, or broadcast media, for example, may search for and find the multimedia content. In this regard, the invention provides a system and method that receives multimedia content and separates the multimedia content into separate components which are assigned to multimedia categories, such as image, video, audio, synthetic and text. Within each of the multimedia categories, the multimedia content is classified and descriptions of the multimedia content are generated. The descriptions are then formatted, integrated, using a multimedia integration description scheme, and the multimedia integration description is generated for the multimedia content. The multimedia description is then stored into a database. As a result, a user may query a search engine which then retrieves the multimedia content from the database whose integration description matches the query criteria specified by the user. The search engine can then provide the user a useful search result based on the multimedia integration description.

Claims

1. A tangible computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computing device to generate description records from media content, the instructions comprising:

based on media content, generating non-hierarchical entity relation graph descriptions for at least one multimedia type, wherein the non-hierarchical entity relation graph descriptions are associated with communication between multimedia objects; and

integrating the multimedia object descriptions and the entity relation graph descriptions to generate at least one description record to represent content embedded within the multimedia content.

2. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating non-hierarchical entity relation graph descriptions for at least one multimedia type based on media content further comprises:

identifying multimedia types in multimedia content; and

extracting multimedia objects to generate multimedia object descriptions from the multimedia content for at least one of the multimedia types, wherein generating non-hierarchical entity relation graph is based on at least in part on the multimedia object descriptions.

3. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, the instructions further comprising generating, from the multimedia content, multimedia object hierarchy descriptions by object hierarchy construction and extraction processing for at least one of the multimedia types.

4. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein the multimedia types include at least one of image, audio, video, synthetic and text.

5. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 2, wherein extracting the multimedia objects further comprises:

segmenting multimedia content into segments including content from at least one of the multimedia types for the multimedia content; and

generating at least one feature description for at least one of the segments by feature extraction and annotation, wherein the generated multimedia object descriptions comprise the at least one feature description for the at least one segment.

6. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 5, wherein the segments are selected from the group consisting of local segments and global segments.

7. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 5, the instructions further comprising selecting the at least one feature description from the group consisting of media, semantic, and temporal features.

8. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 7, wherein the media features are further defined by at least one feature description selected from the group comprising data location, scalable representation, and modality transcoding.

9. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 7, wherein the semantic features are further defined by at least one feature description selected from the group comprising keywords, who, what object, what action, why, when, where, and text annotation.

10. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 7, wherein the temporal features are further defined by at least one feature description consisting of duration.

11. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 5, wherein extracting the multimedia objects further comprises:

generating media object descriptions from the multimedia segment for one of the multimedia types by media object extraction processing;

generating media object hierarchy descriptions from the generated media object descriptions by object hierarchy construction and extraction processing; and

generating media entity relation graph descriptions from the generated media object descriptions by entity relation graph generation processing.

12. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 11, wherein the instructions for extracting media objects and further generating media object descriptions further comprise:

segmenting the content of each multimedia type in the multimedia object into segments within the multimedia object by media segmentation processing; and

generating at least one feature description for at least one of the segments by feature extraction and annotation, wherein the generated media object descriptions comprise the at least one feature description for the at least one of the segments.

13. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein extracting the multi-media objects further comprises selecting the at least one feature description from the group consisting of media, semantic and temporal.

14. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein generating media object hierarchy descriptions generates media object hierarchy descriptions of the media object descriptions based on media feature relationships of media objects represented by the media object descriptions.

15. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein generating media object hierarchy descriptions generates semantic object hierarchy descriptions of the media object descriptions based on semantic feature relationships of media objects represented by the media object descriptions.

16. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein generating media object hierarchy descriptions generates temporal object hierarchy descriptions of the media object descriptions based on temporal features relationships of media objects represented by the media object descriptions.

17. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein generating media object hierarchy descriptions generates media object hierarchy descriptions of the media object descriptions based on relationships of media objects represented by the media object descriptions, and wherein the relationships are selected from the group comprising media feature relationships, semantic feature relationships, temporal feature relationships, and spatial feature relationships.

18. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 12, wherein generating media entity relation graph descriptions generates entity relation graph descriptions of the media object descriptions based on relationship of the media objects represented by the media object descriptions, wherein the relationships are selected from the group comprising media feature relationships, semantic feature relationships, temporal feature relationships, and spatial feature relationships.

19. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating multimedia object hierarchy descriptions further generates multimedia object hierarchy descriptions of the multimedia object descriptions based on media feature relationships of multimedia objects represented by the multimedia object descriptions.

20. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating multimedia object hierarchy descriptions further generates semantic object hierarchy descriptions of the multimedia object descriptions based on semantic feature relationships of multimedia objects represented by the multimedia object descriptions.

21. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating multimedia object hierarchy descriptions further generates temporal object hierarchy descriptions of the multimedia object descriptions based on temporal feature relationships of multimedia objects represented by the multimedia object descriptions.

22. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating multimedia object hierarchy descriptions further generates multimedia object hierarchy descriptions of the multimedia object descriptions based on relationships of multimedia objects represented by the multimedia object descriptions, wherein the relationships are selected from the group comprising media feature relationships, semantic feature relationships, temporal feature relationships, and spatial feature relationships.

23. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, wherein generating entity relation graph descriptions further generates the entity relation graph descriptions of the multimedia object descriptions based on relationships of multimedia objects represented by the multimedia object descriptions, wherein the relationships are selected from the group comprising media feature relationships, semantic feature relationships, temporal feature relationships, and spatial feature relationships.

24. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 1, the instructions further comprising:

receiving and encoding the multimedia object descriptions into encoded description information; and

storing the encoded description information as the at least one description record.

25. The tangible computer-readable medium of claim 2, the instructions further comprising:

combining the multimedia object description, the multimedia object hierarchy descriptions, and the entity relation graph description to form a multimedia description;

receiving and encoding the multimedia description into encoded description information; and

storing the encoded description information as the at least one description record.