Data Organization and Search in Multimedia Databases

The wealth of multimedia items and their increasingcomplexity make data organization and searchessential. Without efficient storage accurate searchand informative retrieval it is hard to explore amultimedia repository to its full potential.We argue that the problems of managing large andheterogeneous multimedia repositories can bealleviated by bringing improvements in severalaspects: storage model high-dimensional indexingand retrieval. Three main contributions are proposed:a database model a high-dimensional indexing methodand a faceted retrieval system.The database model accounts for content organizationand its association to metadata. It is a hybridrelational-XML database model.For search within the high-dimensional data anindexing method called BitMatrix isproposed. It constructs bit signatures that can be efficiently processed withbitwise operations. Our experiments have shown thatthe use of the BitMatrix as a high-dimensionalindexing method is beneficial for the retrieval process. Finally a retrieval system called MetaMedia wasdeveloped in which the proposed database model andthe BitMatrix index are instantiated.