Accessing audio and video used to be a simple matter - simple because of the simplicity of the access mechanisms and because of the poverty of the sources. An incommensurable amount of audiovisual information is becoming available in digital form, in digital archives, on the World Wide Web, in broadcast data streams and in personal and professional databases, and this amount is only growing. The value of information often depends on how easy it can be found, retrieved, accessed, filtered and managed. 

The transition between the second and third millennium abounds with new ways to produce, offer, filter, search, and manage digitized multimedia information. Broadband is being offered with increasing audio and video quality and speed of access. The trend is clear: in the next few years, users will be confronted with such a large number of contents provided by multiple sources that efficient and accurate access to this almost infinite amount of content seems unimaginable today. In spite of the fact that users have increasing access to these resources, identifying and managing them efficiently is becoming more difficult, because of the sheer volume. This applies to professional as well as end users. The question of identifying and managing content is not just restricted to database retrieval applications such as digital libraries, but extends to areas like broadcast channel selection, multimedia editing, and multimedia directory services. 

This challenging situation demands a timely solution to the problem. MPEG-7 is the answer to this need. 

MPEG-7 is an ISO/IEC standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), the committee that also developed the successful standards known as MPEG-1 (1992) and MPEG-2 (1994), and the MPEG-4 standard (Version 1 in 1998, and version 2 in 1999). The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards have enabled the production of widely adopted commercial products, such as Video CD, MP3, digital audio broadcasting (DAB), DVD, digital television (DVB and ATSC), and many video-on-demand trials and commercial services. MPEG-4 is the first real multimedia representation standard, allowing interactivity and a combination of natural and synthetic material coded in the form of objects (it models audiovisual data as a composition of these objects). MPEG-4 provides the standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution and content access paradigms of the fields of interactive multimedia, mobile multimedia, interactive graphics and enhanced digital television. 

The MPEG-7 standard, formally named "Multimedia Content Description Interface", provides a rich set of standardized tools to describe multimedia content. Both human users and automatic systems that process audiovisual information are within the scope of MPEG-7.

MPEG-7 offers a comprehensive set of audiovisual Description Tools (the metadata elements and their structure and relationships, that are defined by the standard in the form of Descriptors and Description Schemes) to create descriptions (i.e., a set of instantiated Description Schemes and their corresponding Descriptors at the users will), which will form the basis for applications enabling the needed effective and efficient access (search, filtering and browsing) to multimedia content. This is a challenging task given the broad spectrum of requirements and targeted multimedia applications, and the broad number of audiovisual features of importance in such context. 

MPEG-7 has been developed by experts representing broadcasters, electronics manufacturers, content creators and managers, publishers, intellectual property rights managers, telecommunication service providers and academia.