A Multimedia Model Based on Structured Media and Sub-Elements for Complex Multimedia Authoring and Presentation

Abstract

Declarative definition of multimedia presentation such as provided by SMIL standard can be considered as the most significant advance in the multimedia integration domain. However, the requirements of a model that could express richer scenarios for presentations are always a challenge. The work presented here proposes an extended model based on the concept of structured media and sub-elements that allows a finer granularity and a more semantic specification of significant events and locations inside media fragments. The new media fragments can be composed in multimedia scenarios through the specification of temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal relations. Moreover, we propose an abstract animation model that can be combined with the intra-media temporal structuration to specify animation effects in a flexible, not redundant and easy to maintain way. The underlying model is the Madeus model that is a flexible model based on the structural, interval, region and relative constraints. This paper describes the subelement and the abstract animation models and shows how they are implemented in the Madeus multimedia framework. A complete schema of the video authoring tool based on this model is also specified. Thanks to that, the fine-grained authoring of multimedia scenarios with video media can be done in an easy and effective way.