A Hybrid Model for Image Databases

This paper discusses an approach to organizing and structuring databases that are rich in visual data. Such databases are in sharp contrast to those that contain significant quantities of textual and numeric data. Traditional relational database technology handles textual and numeric data very well, but is not designed to incorporate non-textual, nonnumeric data. There have been some recent approaches to addressing this problem of incorporating visual data. However, these approaches are inadequate and labor-intensive. The present proposal sets forth an automatic way of providing useful structure to databases which contain significant quantities of visual data. This proposal incorporates existing technology, that as of yet, has not been applied to the present problem. This proposal also sets forth a new approach to database management in the context of visual data.