MPEG-7 Audio Technology: Advanced Audio Content Indexing & Retrieval System for Digital Media Libraries and Music Databases

This book does a very good job of explaining all of the descriptors, the mathematics behind them, and the related XML via examples, equations, and good instructive diagrams. The tone is much more accessible and less academic than most books about multimedia standards. However, this should not be your first exposure to audio signal processing. If it is, you will be lost in the portion of the book that describes what all of the descriptors actually mean. Likewise, it should not be your first exposure to MPEG-7. You should already understand the standard to the extent that you know its motivation and its structure somewhat. The other mathematical and scientific concepts discussed in this book include linear algebra topics such as principal component analysis and singular value decomposition, support vector machines, hidden Markov models, automatic speech recognition methods, and music description methods. None of these topics are covered in such detail in this book that this should be your only source. However, if you already understand audio signal processing and have been introduced to the MPEG-7 standard, this is an excellent book to delve deeply into the audio part of MPEG-7. In fact, it is the only one of its kind on the topic. If you want a good book on the MPEG-7 standard as a whole, might I recommend "Introduction to MPEG 7: Multimedia Content Description Language".For those interested in an example of an implementation of MPEG-7 Audio, type "Java MPEG-7 Audio Encoder" into Google. The first link listed is such a functioning application written in Java that takes an audio file as an input and outputs an XML file consisting of the MPEG-7 audio low level descriptors.