MULTIMEDIA DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

MULTIMEDIA DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS Recently Published Titles: Consulting Editor Borko Furht Florida Atlantic University VIDEO AND IMAGE PROCESSING IN MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS, by Borko Furht, Stephen W. Smo\iar, HongJiang Zhang ISBN: 0-7923-9604-9 MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS AND TECHNIQUES, edited by Borko Furht ISBN: 0-7923-9683-9 MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS, edited by Borko Furht ISBN: 0-7923-9721-5

MULTIMEDIA DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS B. Prabhakaran Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India and University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland, USA SPRINGER SCIENCE+ BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4613-7860-0 ISBN 978-1-4615-6235-1 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-6235-1 Copyright 1997 by Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover Ist edition 1997 AH rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. Printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS PREFACE Vll 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Types of Multimedia Information 1.2 Multimedia Database Applications 3 1.3 Multimedia Objects: Characteristics 7 1.4 Multimedia Database Management System: Components 10 1.5 Concluding Remarks 21 1 2 2 MULTIMEDIA STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL 2.1 Multimedia Object Storage 2.2 File Retrieval Structures 2.3 Disk Scheduling 2.4 Server Admission Control 2.5 Concluding Remarks 25 25 40 42 46 49 3 METADATA FOR MULTIMEDIA 53 3.1 Metadata : Classification 53 3.2 Metadata for Text 57 3.3 Metadata for Speech 62 3.4 Metadata for Images 69 3.5 Metadata for Video 74 3.6 Concluding Remarks 81 4 MULTIMEDIA DATA ACCESS 4.1 Access to Text Data 4.2 Access to Speech Data 85 85 95 v

VI MULTIMEDIA DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 4.3 Access to Image Data 97 4.4 Access to Video Data 108 4.5 Concluding Remarks 112 5 MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION MODELING 117 5.1 Object-Oriented Modeling 117 5.2 Temporal Models 128 5.3 Spatial Models 134 5.4 Multimedia Authoring 136 5.5 Concluding Remarks 138 6 QUERYING MULTIMEDIA DATABASES 141 6.1 Query Processing 141 6.2 Query Languages 144 6.3 Concluding Remarks 152 7 MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION 155 7.1 Retrieval Schedule Generation 155 7.2 Multimedia Server-Client Interaction 162 7.3 Network Support for Multimedia Communication 168 7.4 Concluding Remarks 173 8 MMDBMS ARCHITECTURE 177 8.1 Distributed MMDBMS Architecture 177 8.2 Implementation Considerations 180 8.3 Concluding Remarks 181 REFERENCES 183 INDEX 205

PREFACE Multimedia databases are very popular because of the wide variety of applications that can be supported. These applications include Video-on-Demand (VoD), teaching aids, multimedia document authoring systems, and shopping guides amongst a score of many others. Multimedia databases involve accessing and manipulating stored information belonging to different media such as text, audio, image, and video. The distinctions between multimedia databases and the traditional ones are due to the following characteristics of media objects : Sizes of the media objects (in terms of bytes of information) Real-time nature of the information content Raw or uninterpreted nature of the media information. These characteristics in turn raise the following issues: 1. Storage of media objects needs different techniques due to the volume as well as the real-time requirement for their fast retrieval. 2. The contents of media objects are largely binary in nature. Hence, they have to be interpreted based on the type of media, contents of the objects, and the needs of an application. As an example, a facial image will be stored as a binary file. Interpretations have to be made for identifying the features of a face such as color of hair, eyes, shape of nose, etc. These interpretations, termed metadata, have to be automatically or semiautomatically generated from media objects. 3. Fast access to stored multimedia information requires different indexing techniques to be provided for handling various media objects. 4. Media objects, associated metadata, the objects' temporal and spatial characteristics have to be modeled in such a way that they can be easily manipulated. VII

Vlll MULTIMEDIA DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 5. Accessing multimedia information is done through user queries that describe the metadata associated with the objects as well as the objects' temporal and spatial characteristics. 6. Multimedia information can be distributed over computer networks. Accessing distributed multimedia data necessitates support from network service provider for communicating large media objects with real-time requirements. Our aim in this text is to bring out the issues and the techniques used in building multimedia database management systems. The book is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, we provide an overview of multimedia databases and underline the new requirements for these applications. In Chapter 2, we discuss the techniques used for storing and retrieving multimedia objects. In Chapter 3, we present the techniques used for generating metadata for various media objects. In Chapter 4, we examine the mechanisms used for storing the index information needed for accessing different media objects. In Chapter 5, we analyze the approaches for modeling media objects, their temporal and spatial characteristics. Object-oriented approach, with some additional features, has been widely used to model multimedia information. We discuss two systems that use object-oriented models: OVID (Object Video Information Database) and Jasmine. Then, we study the models for representing temporal and spatial requirements of media objects. We also describe authoring techniques used for specifying temporal and spatial characteristics of multimedia databases. In Chapter 6, we explain different types of multimedia queries, the methodologies for processing them and the language features for describing them. We also study the features offered by query languages such as SQL/MM (Structured Query Language for Multimedia), PICQUERY+, and Video SQL. In Chapter 7, we deal with the communication requirements for multimedia databases. A client accessing multimedia data over computer networks needs to identify a schedule for retrieving various media objects composing the database. We identify possible ways for generating a retrieval schedule. In Chapter 8, we tie together the techniques discussed in the previous chapters by providing a simple architecture of a distributed multimedia database management system. The book can be used as a text for graduate students and researchers working in the area of multimedia databases. It can also be used for an advanced course for motivated undergraduates. More over, it can serve as a basic reading material for computer professionals who are in (or moving to) the area of multimedia databases.

Preface IX Acknowledgment I would like to thank Prof V.S. Subrahmanian for his encouragement. Thanks to Selcuk for his meticulous reviews and to Eenjun for his feedback. I have benefitted a lot by interacting with them. I learnt a lot by working with Prof S.V. Raghavan and I thank him for that. I acknowledge Prof R. Kalyanakrishnan for his moral support and encouragement. Thanks to Prof. P. Venkat Rangan for his support in many instances. Thanks to my motivating parents, Balakrishnan and Saraswathi, for their love and constant encouragement. Special thanks to my wonderful wife, Raji, for her love, kindness, patience, and encouragement. That she could pitch in with her reviews of the book was really nice. My son, Gokul, brought an entirely new dimension to our life. His loving company and his playfulness have brought lots of joy and happiness in our life. He even co-authored the book by his bangings on the keyboard. Though I would like to attribute any mistakes in the book to his co-authorship, Raji would not let me do so. I acknowledge the love and support provided by my brothers, Sridhar and Shankar, Manni, the loving kids Madhu and Keechu. Finally, the research work for writing this book was supported by the Army Research Office under grant DAAH-04-95-10174, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant F49620-93-1-0065, by ARPA/Rome Labs contract Nr. F30602-93-C-0241 (Order Nr. A716), Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement DAALOl-96-2-0002 Federated Laboratory ATIRP Consortium and by an NSF Young Investigator award IRI-93-57756. B. Prabhakaran