The World Wide Web and the Internet are signs that things will be very different in the future. And what is so striking about this computer-age future is that it comes incredibly fast and is incredibly overwhelming. Anyone who has surfed the Web has exclaimed at one point or another that there is so much information available, so much to search and so much to keep up with.Where Lycos and AltaVista are already accepted tools for textual information, image and multimedia search engines are the natural answers in the quest for pictorial information. This book provides a state-of-the-art description of that field. It contains the proceedings of a valuable workshop in Amsterdam, where people gathered to discuss the progress in the field. The topics cover computational methods of searching for pictures, the powerful pictorial clues in the recognition of objects, storage and indexing of objects in a database, and, ways to access the requested pictorial information.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

The explosive growth of multimedia data transmission has generated a critical need for efficient, high-capacity image databases, as well as powerful search engines to retrieve image data from them. This book brings together contributions by an international all-star team of innovators in the field who share their insights into all key aspects of image database and search engine construction. Readers get in-depth discussions of the entire range of crucial image database architecture, indexing and retrieval, transmission, display, and user interface issues. And, using examples from an array of disciplines, the authors present cutting-edge applications in medical imagery, multimedia communications, earth science, remote sensing, and other major application areas.

Multimedia databases address a growing number of commercially important applications such as media on demand, surveillance systems and medical systems. The book presents essential and relevant techniques and algorithms to develop and implement large multimedia database systems.The traditional relational database model is based on a relational algebra that is an offshoot of first-order logic and of the algebra of sets. The simple relational model is not powerful enough to address multimedia data. Because of this, multimedia databases are categorized into many major areas. Each of these areas are now so extensive that a major understanding of the mathematical core concepts requires the study of different fields such as information retrieval, digital image processing, feature extraction, fractals, machine learning, neuronal networks and high-dimensional indexing. This book unifies the essential concepts and recent algorithms into a single comprehensive volume.

With the rapid growth in the use of computers to manipulate, process, and reason about multimedia data, the problem of how to store and retrieve such data is becoming increasingly important. Thus, although the field of multimedia database systems is only about 5 years old, it is rapidly becoming a focus for much excitement and research effort. Multimedia database systems are intended to provide unified frameworks for requesting and integrating information in a wide variety of formats, such as audio and video data, document data, and image data. Such data often have special storage requirements that are closely coupled to the various kinds of devices that are used for recording and presenting the data, and for each form of data there are often multiple representations and multiple standards - all of which make the database integration task quite complex. Some of the problems include: - what a multimedia database query means - what kinds of languages to use for posing queries - how to develop compilers for such languages - how to develop indexing structures for storing media on ancillary devices - data compression techniques - how to present and author presentations based on user queries. Although approaches are being developed for a number of these problems, they have often been ad hoc in nature, and there is a need to provide a princi pled theoretical foundation.

There is now so much data on the Web that managing it with conventional tools is becoming almost impossible. To manage this data, provide interoperability and warehousing between multiple data sources and systems, and extract information from the databases and warehouses, various tools are being developed. In fact, developments in multimedia databa

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

Multimedia technologies are rapidly attracting more and more interest every day. The Internet as seen from the end user is one of the reasons for this phenomenon, but not the only one. Video on Demand is one of the buzzwords today, but its real availability to the general public is yet to come. Content providers – such as publishers, broadcasting companies, and audio/video production ?rms – must be able to archive and index their productions for later retrieval. This is a formidable task, even more so when the material to be sorted encompasses many di?erent types of several media and covers a time span of several years. In order for such a vast amount of data to be easily available, existing database design models and indexing methodologies have to be improved and re?ned. In addition, new techniques especially tailored to the various types of multimedia must be devised and evaluated. For archiving and trasmission, data compression is another issue that needs to be addressed. In many cases, it has been found that compression and indexing can be successfully integrated, since compressing the data by ?ltering out irrelevancy implies some degree of und- standing of the content structure.

Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing begins with the introduction of multimedia information applications, the need for the development of the multimedia database management systems (MDBMSs), and the important issues and challenges of multimedia systems. The temporal relations, the spatial relations, the spatio-temporal relations, and several semantic models for multimedia information systems are also introduced. In addition, this book discusses recent advances in multimedia database searching and multimedia database browsing. More specifically, issues such as image/video segmentation, motion detection, object tracking, object recognition, knowledge-based event modeling, content-based retrieval, and key frame selections are presented for the first time in a single book. Two case studies consisting of two semantic models are included in the book to illustrate how to use semantic models to design multimedia information systems. Semantic Models for Multimedia Database Searching and Browsing is an excellent reference and can be used in advanced level courses for researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers, students, and general readers who are interested in the issues, challenges, and ideas underlying the current practice of multimedia presentation, multimedia database searching, and multimedia browsing in multimedia information systems.

During the last decade, multimedia has emerged as a major research and de velopment area. Pushed by advanced technology like huge-capacity storage de vices, fast networks, and powerful work stations, new applications have arisen. Many definitions of multimedia systems exist, one of them being computer sys tems that support interactive use of at least one of the following information sources: graphics, image, voice, sound, and video. These systems have caused a boom in the world of entertainment, but also in other business areas great opportunities for novel products and services are available. The size of multi media data is often huge, and the storage of huge amounts of data is a task normally allocated to database management systems. Although some modern database management systems offer facilities to support development of multi media applications, many problems related to multimedia support are still not well understood. This book reports on research efforts to solve some of these problems. An in troductory knowledge of databases, and also of operating systems and network technology is assumed. The book is very suitable as material for courses at senior or graduate level, but also for upgrading the skills of computer scientists working on database management systems, multimedia systems or applications. The book consists of four parts. Part I is called "Requirements for a Mul timedia Database" and comprises chapters one to three. Chapter one presents an outline of the book.