Overview
ISO/IEC 15938-9:2005/Amd 1:2012 is an amendment to the MPEG-7 Part 9 standard (Profiles and levels) that introduces the AudioVisual Description Profile (AVDP) and extensions to profiles and levels of the Multimedia Content Description Interface. The amendment refines profile constraints for describing automatic media-analysis results and references the Version 2 XML schema namespace urn:mpeg:mpeg7:schema:2004 (see ISO/IEC 15938-10). It is copyright-protected and published by ISO/IEC in 2012.
Key topics and technical requirements
- AudioVisual Description Profile (AVDP): Adds profile-level rules optimized for audio-visual content analysis metadata.
- Support for automatic media analysis outputs: Explicitly targets low-, mid- and high-level features produced by tools such as shot/scene detection, face recognition/tracking, speech recognition, copy-detection and summarization.
- Tool and provenance metadata: Provides constructs to describe the analysis tool, version, contributors and application timestamp.
- Multi-timeline and confidence support: Enables multiple descriptions with confidence levels across timelines; note that confidence values are not normalized across tools and therefore not directly comparable.
- Schema- and element-level constraints: The amendment enumerates many element-level restrictions (inclusions, exclusions, minOccurs adjustments and attribute limits) to define a tight, interoperable profile for AVDP use. Examples include mediaTimeBase and mediaTimeUnit handling, media instance referencing patterns, and rules for where MediaInformation, DescriptionMetadata and other headers may appear.
- XML namespace and versioning: Defined relative to the Version 2 MPEG-7 schema (ISO/IEC 15938-10).
Applications and who uses it
- Practical applications: Archive management, broadcast and news production, new-media services, benchmarking initiatives, large-scale video analytics projects, multimedia summarization and automated content indexing.
- Primary users: Metadata architects, multimedia system designers, tool and SDK vendors (media-analysis/AI vendors), archivists, broadcasters, research labs running evaluation/benchmarking of video analysis.
- Value proposition: Enables interoperable exchange of media-analysis outputs, reproducible evaluation of tools, and consistent metadata descriptions for downstream search, retrieval and content management.
Related standards
- ISO/IEC 15938-10 (MPEG-7 Version 2 XML schema) - referenced for schema namespace and types
- Other MPEG‑7 parts (e.g., parts 3, 4, 5) - headers and datatype rules referenced in profile constraints
Keywords: ISO/IEC 15938-9:2005/Amd 1:2012, MPEG-7, multimedia content description interface, AudioVisual Description Profile, AVDP, automatic media analysis, metadata, video analysis, face recognition, speech recognition, copy detection, summarisation, XML schema.