Toward hardware implementation of the compact color descriptor for real time video indexing

The content-based multimedia indexing is today considered as being a key technology for numerous applications. A standard, called MPEG-7, has been elaborated. It provides a framework of standardized tools that can be used to describe and efficiently manage multimedia content. While many researches have concentrated on generating the descriptors the environments and applications, there has been little effort devoted to real time descriptors extraction. The real time constraint is very important for several applications such as real time annotation of MPEG-7 video streams. Video-parsing methods dealing with uncompressed video are characterized by their computational intensive aspect. In addition, complex methods or methods combining several algorithms are more robust and lead to better quality, but they are known by their greediness in computational resources. So, when dealing with real-time treatment, we have to use efficient technological solutions to succeed the implementation of these techniques. The used solutions must satisfy the different application requirements such as calculation power, flexibility, consumption, etc. In this paper we propose a hardware implementation of the compact color descriptor (CCD), which is a color descriptor in the MPEG-7 standard. It can be used for content filtering; image matching and browsing application. Several implementation solutions of the different CCD extraction steps are given.