An evaluation of existing metadata compression and encoding technologies for MPEG-21 applications

XML-based metadata for digital media is becoming increasingly important, as a consequence also calling for efficient encoding and compression schemes for the storage and transport of this metadata. Moreover, support for streaming the XML metadata in conjunction with the media data is highly desirable. Such support is provided, for instance, by MPEG's binary format for metadata (BiM) encoding approach, which facilitates fragmenting, delivering, and accessing the metadata in so-called access units (AUs). In this paper, we present a quantitative evaluation of existing XML metadata compression and encoding techniques, reaching from widely used state-of-the-art data compression algorithms to sophisticated XML-aware encoding schemes. The comparison is based on compressing MPEG-21 generic bitstream syntax descriptions (gBSDs) which can grow to non-negligible sizes. The main conclusion from this investigation is that in terms of pure compression efficiency on XML files, the BiM approach (exemplified by the MPEG reference software as well as a commercial version thereof) is comparable - in terms of performance - with traditional data or specific XML compression tools. However, when XML metadata have to be fragmented, compressed, and streamed in such fragments, the results indicate that the BiM approach is superior to the other schemes.