The MPEG standards are an evolving set of standards for video and audio compression. MPEG 7 technology covers the most recent developments in multimedia search and retreival, designed to standardise the description of multimedia content supporting a wide range of applications including DVD, CD and HDTV. Multimedia content description, search and retrieval is a rapidly expanding research area due to the increasing amount of audiovisual (AV) data available. The wealth of practical applications available and currently under development (for example, large scale multimedia search engines and AV broadcast servers) has lead to the development of processing tools to create the description of AV material or to support the identification or retrieval of AV documents. Written by experts in the field, this book has been designed as a unique tutorial in the new MPEG 7 standard covering content creation, content distribution and content consumption. At present there are no books documenting the available technologies in such a comprehensive way. It presents a comprehensive overview of the principles and concepts involved in the complete range of Audio Visual material indexing, metadata description, information retrieval and browsing. It details the major processing tools used for indexing and retrieval of images and video sequences. Individual chapters, written by experts who have contributed to the development of MPEG 7, provide clear explanations of the underlying tools and technologies contributing to the standard. It includes a demostration software offering step-by-step guidance to the multi-media system components and experimentation model (XM) MPEG reference software. It coincides with the release of the ISO standard in late 2001. This is a valuable reference resource for practising electronic and communications engineers designing and implementing MPEG 7 compliant systems, as well as for researchers and students working with multimedia database technology.