A proposed taxonomy of media collections and its implications for design and management of multimedia databases.

The extension of the principles of database management to encompass collections of media artefacts has led to a new range of solutions, and a matching extensive literature covering both research (including content-based retrieval, metadata standards and cataloguing, best practices for media acquisition, and digital preservation) and implementation (from web page content management to online museums, digital libraries, media archives and satellite and medical imaging). To make use of, and contribute to, this literature (whether by further research, design or new implementations) there must first be an overview of the domain. There are two ways in which this overview can be attained: one is to have a continual survey of what exists, and the other is to establish a comprehensive system of classification. Surveys are found either as enumerative assessment of problem domains, or as justification for comprehensive general solutions. The former (such as Martinez and Mouaddib, 1999; Ozden et al., 1997; Vogel et al., 1995; Yoshitaka and Ichikawa, 1999), while invaluable when published, cannot hope to be exhaustive, and rapidly become obsolete; and we are still left with the (recursive) problem of referencing the surveys themselves. Moreover, we can have no reason to expect that a set of general principles will emerge from these efforts (Quicke. 1993). Even where such surveys begin with a checklist in the form of a taxonomy (such as Martinez and Mouaddib, 1999) the result is still an enumeration with regularised attributes rather than a classification proper. On the other hand, surveys that are made for the purposes of justifying general solutions (e.g. Del Bimbo, 1996; (Grosky, 1997) cannot necessarily be treated as comprehensive coverage of the domain, nor will a collection of such surveys ever amount to a complete coverage. Classifications of multimedia collections should begin with an a priori taxonomy informed by surveys of the literature, but with the intent to comprehensively map out the entire multimedia domain. Such approaches have proved successful in the fields of visual programming (Burnett and Baker. 1994), data visualisation (Schneiderman, 1996) and media immersion interfaces (Gabbard and Hix, 2003). Taxonomies have the advantage that while the systems that are classified may become obsolete, the framework can deal with new examples and still serve its purpose. This paper proposes such a taxonomy, and describes its implications for design and management of multimedia databases

Inference and Retrieval of Facial Images

10.1007/BF01213579Multimedia Systems211-14MUSY

Neural networks versus Image Pyramids

Neural networks and image pyramids are massively parallel processing structures. In this paper we exploit the similarities as well as the differences between these structures. The general goal is to exchange knowledge between these two fields. After introducing the basic concepts of neural networks and image pyramids we give a translation table of the vocabulary used in image pyramids and those used in neural networks. In the following sections we compare neural networks and image pyramids in detail. We show how a modified Hopfield network can be used for irregular decimation. We examine the type of knowledge stored and the processing performed by pyramids and neural networks. In the case of numerical information, so called "numerical pyramids" are rather similar to neural networks

Fuzzy logic techniques in multimedia database querying: A Preliminary Investigation of the Potentials

International audienceFuzzy logic is known for providing a convenient tool for interfacing linguistic categories with numerical data and for expressing user’s preference in a gradual and qualitative way. Fuzzy set methods have been already applied to the representation of flexible queries and to the modelling of uncertain pieces of information in databases systems as well as in information retrieval. This methodology seems to be even more promising in multimedia databases which have a complex structure and from which documents have to be retrieved and selected not only from their contents but also from their appearance, as specified by the user. This paper provides a preliminary investigation of the potential applications of fuzzy logic in multimedia databases. Querying issues are more particularly emphasized. We distinguish two types of request, namely those which can be handled within some extended version of an SQL-like language, and those for which one has to elicitate user’s preference through examples and which have an incremental nature. Moreover, the particular case of semi-structured documents is briefly discussed. Lastly, potentials of flexible constraint satisfaction problems in document production are pointed out

Photobook: Content-Based Manipulation of Image Databases

We describe the Photobook system, which is a set of interactive tools for browsing and searching images and image sequences. These query tools differ from those used in standard image databases in that they make direct use of the image content rather than relying on text annotations. Direct search on image content is made possible by use of semantics-preserving image compression, which reduces images to a small set of perceptually-significant coefficients. We describe three types of Photobook descriptions in detail: one that allows search based on appearance, one that uses 2-D shape, and a third that allows search based on textural properties. These image content descriptions can be combined with each other and with textbased descriptions to provide a sophisticated browsing and search capability. In this paper we demonstrate Photobook on databases containing images of people, video keyframes, hand tools, fish, texture swatches, and 3-D medical data