Multimedia content filtering, browsing, and matching using MPEG-7 compact color descriptors

This paper presents two compact color feature descriptors that have been accepted to the working draft of MPEG-7, the ongoing activity to standardize multimedia content descriptions. The need for content description arises from the increase in the number of broadcast channels and the availability of a large number of video content over the Internet. Without such descriptions, the average consumer would be left helpless with enormous amount of data and no viable tool to efficiently access the content. MPEG-7 is standardizing descriptions for audio-visual features such as color, shape, and texture, and as well as the higher level semantic features. Here we present two color descriptors that are very compact in size, namely, the compact color histogram descriptor and the compact color layout descriptor. These two descriptors capture complementary characteristics of the color content of images. The compact sizes of these descriptors result in minimal storage and transmission requirements of the image representation. We demonstrate the efficacy of these descriptors for video content filtering, image matching, sketch-based matching and browsing applications.