Query interface for multimedia database system.

Abstract

Multimedia database system differs significantly from traditional database system. The introduction of non-numerical media types, such as image, video, and audio, requests the development of database technology to handle the challenge. At the same time, the demands for multimedia applications are growing rapidly. The central repository of almost every multimedia application is exclusively a multimedia database system. Thus, the efficient query and retrieval information from the database becomes an important issue. To fulfill the task of information retrieval, a multimedia query language, which takes into account the complex spatial and temporal relationships as well as media information, should be integrated with the database system. One of the difficulties in dealing with multimedia data is how to effectively express its very rich semantics in a query. It might be with obstacle for some users to translate the perceptions of multimedia information into the expression of query language. Therefore, a friendly and easy-to-user graphical user interface is needed on top the query language to help the user to construct queries. In this thesis, an interactive query interface for multimedia database named MEDIAQUINT is proposed. It focuses on supplying visual query facilities to end-users so that they can formulate the query based on their memory representation of the interested multimedia scenario. The system architecture and implementation of the graphical user interface are presented.