Universal multimedia access

A growing diversity of pervasive devices such as wireless phones and hand-held computers is gaining access to the Internet and other information sources. However, much of the rich multimedia content cannot be easily handled by the terminal devices with limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. One of the driving applications of the MPEG-7 multimedia content description standard involves the concept of "Universal Multimedia Access." The basic idea of Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) is the allowance of scalable or adaptive delivery of multimedia to users and terminals regardless of conditions of communication bandwidth or capabilities of terminal devices and their support for media formats. In this paper, we describe how MPEG-7 enables UMA by providing tools for specification of Transcoding Hints, Content Variations, Space and Frequency Views, and Summaries.