An extension of BSDL for multimedia bitstream syntax description

Abstract

In previous works, a generic framework for multimedia content adaptation has been introduced, where XML is used to describe the high-level structure of a bitstream and the resulting description is first transformed by an XSLT style sheet, and then processed to generate an adapted bitstream. In order to provide full interoperability, a new language named Bitstream Syntax Description Language (BSDL) is built on top of W3C XML Schema for the purpose of this generation process. A schema designed in this language and specific to a given coding format allows a generic processor to parse a description and generate the corresponding adapted bitstream. This paper describes an extension of BSDL to provide the new functionality corresponding to the reverse operation, i.e. allowing a generic software module to parse a bitstream conforming to a given coding format described by a schema, and generate the corresponding description. For this, BSDL introduces a number of language mechanisms on top of XML Schema. This paper details these language extensions and reviews the strengths and limits of this approach. © Springer-Verlag 2003.