An authoring schema for multimedia documents with structured media

The authoring of multimedia presentation often directly uses media for composition and therefore limits the fragment integration capacity among media objects. We have integrated in the authoring system two new modules (see Fig.) that allows media fragment composition. Firstly, the analysis/generation module automatically analyses media content and then generates a first version of media content description in accordance with the media content model. Secondly, the authoring media content description module, which takes the generated content description as an input, and allows the author to manually complete or modify it. Finally, a structured media that contains not only the content information for its presentation but also the description of this content for fine-grained synchronization is available for multimedia integration. This author-ing schema presents not only a real time generation of media content description but also could reuse existing media content described by standards such as MPEG-7.

We have applied on this schema with video media and we have integrated it into the Madeus system: the analysis/generation tool allows generating StructuredVideo elements automatically and the VideoMadeus editing tool that allows the modification of the content description information of the StructuredVideo element and the extrac-tion of any fragment of video for its composition inside a Madeus presentation. That provides facilities for the author not only to specify temporal and spatial layout for the presentation of other media objects according to events in the video sequence, but also to make presentation constraints between the media objects and the video events, such as, a text introducing about an actor displays when the actor appears on screen.