Data Organization And Search In Multimedia Databases

The wealth of multimedia items and their increasing
complexity make data organization and search
essential. Without efficient storage, accurate search
and informative retrieval, it is hard to explore a
multimedia repository to its full potential.
We argue that the problems of managing large and
heterogeneous multimedia repositories can be
alleviated by bringing improvements in several
aspects: storage model, high-dimensional indexing,
and retrieval. Three main contributions are proposed:
a database model, a high-dimensional indexing method
and a faceted retrieval system.
The database model accounts for content organization
and its association to metadata. It is a hybrid
relational-XML database model.
For search within the high-dimensional data, an
indexing method called BitMatrix is
proposed. It constructs bit
signatures that can be efficiently processed with
bitwise operations. Our experiments have shown that
the use of the BitMatrix as a high-dimensional
indexing method is beneficial for the retrieval process.
Finally, a retrieval system called MetaMedia was
developed, in which the proposed database model and
the BitMatrix index are instantiated.