Practical MPEG-7 image indexing & retrieval for undergraduates

A practical component to an upper year electrical and computer engineering course in information engineering or multimedia systems is presented. Developed to introduce students to image indexing and retrieval, the experiment uses a Microsoft Windows binary of the freely available MPEG-7 Experimentation Model from ISO for image description. The experiment is broken into three interdependent stages spanning a three week period. Each stage demonstrates various concepts associated with image indexing and retrieval. Students require C/C++ programming skills to parse binary encoded MPEG-7 descriptions, output ASCII description data, and perform retrievals on indexed information. The laboratory is distributed in nature, and each participating student is made to work on a small, mutually exclusive image set. The experiment drives home the urgency of the media indexing problem in light of the rapidly growing market need for multimedia management applications resulting from the huge influx of multimedia data. Through feedback, student views indicate that despite being long and time consuming, the experiment provides an interesting, original and stimulating experience.