Here comes MPEG-7
Posted by Sachin Garg on 21st September 2005 | Permanent Link
I came across this press release about a surveillance camera that performs real-time video analysis to mask people’s identities, and to generate annotations describing the video content according to the emerging MPEG-7 standard. Probably one of the first few products to adopt MPEG-7.
Dubbed “Eptacam”, the camera protects personal data by hiding people’s identities, while maintaining the surveillance factor in the resulting video. Should an incident occur, authorized personnel who possess the proper decryption key can play back video recorded from the camera revealing people’s identities.
Based on proprietary embedded software, the Eptacam performs video analysis in real-time, generating meta-data annotations encoded in MPEG-7 that provide an overview of what the camera sees.
MPEG-7, formally named “Multimedia Content Description Interface”, is a standard for describing the multimedia content data that supports some degree of interpretation of the information meaning, which can be passed onto, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. MPEG-7 is not aimed at any one application in particular; rather, the elements that MPEG-7 standardizes support as broad a range of applications as possible.