Comparing the quality of multiple descriptions of multimedia documents

With the definition of the MPEG-7 standard, thanks to its inter-operability behaviors, it is now possible for applications to use content descriptions of a same document, coming from different sources. This implies that the overall information available at the application can be highly redundant and mechanisms for filtering the information are hence required. In this work, a general approach to descriptions integration is proposed. The idea is to manipulate information readily available from the considered descriptions to reach an accurate integration result, without having to reprocess the multimedia material. The proposed general framework has been applied at a real problem showing how segment decompositions can be integrated on the basis of dominant color descriptors series. This work introduces also the concept of reliability of descriptor extraction methods demonstrating how it can be effectively used through the proposed integration process.