Using Software Agents with MPEG-7

Descriptions for a Distributed Flexible

Multimedia System
M. Masud Khokhar†, Zafar I. Malik‡, Shaukat Ali†
† Center for Software Dependability (CSD)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
{masud, shaukat}@jinnah.edu.pk
‡ Faculty of Computer and Bio Sciences, Mohammad
Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
zafar@jinnah.edu.pk

Abstract

Distributed Multimedia & its applications are evolving day by day. However, the issues of limited transmission
bandwidth, network reliability, QoS, and flexibility are not yet completely resolved. On the other hand, the www is
growing at a rapid pace and a huge amount of new multimedia data is introduced everyday. This data includes
downloadable and stream-able multimedia content. To enhance the streaming quality with the available
bandwidths, several new codecs and standards are under development. This paper initially discusses the MPEG-4
and MPEG-7 standards for streaming and description of multimedia content respectively and proposes an agent
based architecture to introduce a distributed flexible scheme to query, search, filter, and gather results using the
multimedia content descriptions as provided by the MPEG-7 standard. A resource agent has been used to convert
the multimedia content descriptions of MPEG-7 to a local XML repository, so that efficient query and platform
independence can be achieved.