A C++ Library for Handling MPEG-7 Descriptions

We present a C++ library implementing part 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the MPEG 7 multimedia content description standard, including the updated version finalized in 2004. The library supports handling of MPEG-7 descriptions as trees of typed objects, supporting (de)serialization from/to XML. It has convenient and powerful features such as creation of subtrees by XPath statements and is extensible at runtime. The library is available for Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X. It has been provided under a free use license for several years, downloaded more than 5,200 times and used in a large number of projects. It has been published under GNU LGPL in 2009. This paper discusses the key functionalities of the library as well as some exemplary applications.