A multimedia database workbench for content and context retrieval

Multimedia databases are extending the scope of traditional databases to handle the complex structure of multimedia objects. Models for multimedia information must include representations for the structure and content of several media in a form that allows flexibility in retrieval. Content-based retrieval is the main motivation behind recent research in multimedia databases. The task of searching in video and audio content is made hard by the nature of audiovisual data where, unlike text, there is no direct syntactic channel between the object and its meaning [(R. Zhao and W. I. Grosy, 2002), (J. Chen et al., 2004), (M. Bertini et al., 2003)]. We propose a model for multimedia content storage and retrieval accounting for both context and content information and taking advantage of their dependencies for effective retrieval. We then describe a prototype multimedia database with a retrieval interface. It has been used as a workbench for testing the representation model and integrating tools for feature extraction, information interchange and retrieval. The workbench allows an easy inclusion of new tools for content analysis and new methods for context- and content-based retrieval while offering storage and access for both the actual digital content and its metadata.