Visual Media Coding and Transmission

11.4 Summary of Standardization Activities

This section provides an overview of major standardization efforts that have emerged in recent years and can be generically applied to the implementation of services and tools that contribute to universal access to multimedia content to realize UMA. Context-aware content adaptation systems provide the means to implement UMA, and can thus be built based on the technologies described. Having carefully analyzed these standards, it seems fair to say that the MPEG-21 standard is the most complete one. This is easily explained by the fact that the scope of MPEG-21 is much more than “just” adaptation or “just” context description, as it:

• Defines a complete infrastructure for packaging all the intervenient elements in a compact way that contributes to the augmented access and use of multimedia content, such as content and context descriptions, content representation and composition, management of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and digital rights, enforcement of digital rights and coarse control content consumption, and so on.
• Provides a comprehensive framework for the use of context information, and accordingly mediates the optimum access to content while also deciding the need for adaptation.
• Has a scope of adaptation aiming at all types of content, with its tools/descriptions targeting all kinds of adaptation.
• Makes use of a comprehensive set of descriptions (also through the use of MPEG-7) that are able to characterize virtually any of ...