MPEG is undertaking a new initiative to standardize content description of audio and video data/documents. When it is finalized in 2001, MPEG-7 is expected to provide standardized description schemes for concise and unambiguous content description of data/documents of complex media types. Meanwhile, other meta-data or description schemes, such as Dublin Core, XML, etc., are becoming popular in different application domains. In this paper, we propose the Multimedia Description Framework (MDF), which is designated to accommodate multiple description (meta-data) schemes, both MPEG-7 and non-MPEG-7, into integrated architecture. We will use examples to show how MDF description makes use of combined strength of different description schemes to enhance its expression power and flexibility. We conclude the paper with discussion of using MDF description of a movie video to search/retrieve required scene clips from the movie, on the MDF prototype system we have implemented.

20 pages