We describe a general multimedia query language, called MOQL, based on ODMG's Object Query Language (OQL). In contrast to previous multimedia query languages that are either designed for one particular medium (e.g. images) or specialized for a particular application (e.g., medical imaging), MOQL is general in its treatment of multiple media and different applications. The language includes constructs to capture the temporal and spatial relationships in multimedia data as well as functions for query presentation. We illustrate the language features by query examples. The language is implemented for a multimedia database built on top of ObjectStore.

Many applications would benefit if media objects such as images could be selected and classified (or clustered) such that "conceptually similar" images are grouped together by content. This requires that image content be described by some coherent semantic domain model rather than relying on the use of keywords as in most commercial image database systems. However, a description of image contents cannot be predefined by prescribing what should be in the images but must incrementally evolve to link image instances with descriptions of what is actually there. Flexibility is required as the same image may be reused from many different application perspectives, and classified and reclassified by many different, unpredictable, and possibly contradictory interpretations of the same contents. We present preliminary work on the incremental and flexible description of image and video semantic content by the use of a description logic (DL), GRAIL, developed at the University of Manchester. GRAIL...

In this paper, we propose an approach for the extraction of the repeating patterns in music objects. A repeating pattern is a sequence of notes which appears more than once in a music object. It is one of the most important music features which can be used for both content-based retrieval of music data and music data analysis. We propose a data structure called correlative matrix and its associated algorithms for extracting all repeating patterns in a music object. Experiments are also performed and the results are analyzed to show the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach.

In this paper a visual information retrieval project (VizIR) is presented. The goal of the project is the implementation of an open Contentbased Visual Retrieval (CBVR) prototype as basis for further research on the major problems of CBVR. The motivation behind VizIR is: an open platform would make research (especially for smaller institutions) easier and more efficient. The intention of this paper is to let interested researchers know about VizIR's existence and design as well as to invite them to take part in the design and implementation process of this open project. The authors describe the goals of the VizIR project, the intended design of the framework and major implementation issues. The latter includes a sketch on the advantages and drawbacks of the existing cross-platform media processing frameworks: Java Media Framework, OpenML and Microsoft's DirectX (DirectShow).

A key aspect in video modeling is spatial relationships. In this paper we propose a spatial representation for specifying the spatial semantics of video data. Based on such a representation, a set of spatial relationships for salient objects is defined to support qualitative and quantitative spatial properties. The model captures both topological and directional spatial relationships. We present a novel way of incorporating this model into a video model, and integrating the abstract video model into an object database management system which has rich multimedia temporal operations. The integrated model is further enhanced by a spatial inference engine. The powerful expressiveness of our video model is validated by some query examples.

Modeling moving objects has become a topic of increasing interest in the area of video databases. Two key aspects of such modeling are spatial and temporal relationships. In this paper we introduce an innovative way to represent the trajectory of a single moving object and the relative spatio-temporal relations between multiple moving objects. The representation supports a rich set of spatial topological and directional relations. It also supports both quantitative and qualitative user queries about moving objects. Algorithms for matching trajectories and spatio-temporal relations of moving objects are designed to facilitate query processing. These algorithms can handle both exact and similarity matches. We also discuss the integration of our moving object model, based on a video model, in an object-oriented system. Some query examples are provided to further validate the expressiveness of our model.

We describe a system for browsing and interactively retrieving video over the Internet at multiple spatial and temporal resolutions. The VideoZoom system enables users to start with coarse, low-resolution views of the sequences and selectively zoom-in in space and time. VideoZoom decomposes the video sequences into a hierarchy of view elements, which are retrieved in a progressive fashion. The client browser incrementally builds the views by retrieving, caching and assembling the view elements, as needed. By integrating browsing and retrieval into a single progressive retrieval paradigm, VideoZoom provides a new and useful system for accessing video over the Internet. VideoZoom is suitable for digital video libraries and a number of other applications in which streaming methods provide insufficient quality of video, video downloading introduces large latencies, and generating video summaries is difficult or not well integrated with video retrieval tasks.

Video is becoming a popular medium for data collection. The challenge of analyzing video data is to abstract and conclude quantitative results from such a rich, qualitative medium. The focus of our research is to support video analysis by developing a user-friendly interactive visualization environment to query video data using spatio-temporal characteristics and to review visual results for trend analysis. In this paper, we present our approach for identifying temporal trends in video data via querying for relationships between video annotations. Our approach allows users to analyze the video in terms of temporal relationships between events (e.g., events of type B frequently follow events of type A). We present a temporal visual query language for specifying relative temporal queries between sets of annotations. This query language builds on the notion of dynamic query filters and significantly extends them with temporal query support. It is tailored for temporal analysis---allowin...

One of the key aspects of videos is the temporal relationship between video frames. In this paper we propose a tree-based model for specifying the temporal semantics of video data. We present a unique wayofintegrating our video model into an object database management system which has richmultimedia temporal operations. We further showhow temporal histories are used to model video data, explore the video objectbase using object-oriented techniques. Such a seamless integration gives a uniform interface to end users. The integrated video objectbase management system supports a broad range of temporal queries.

An abstract semantic model based on augmented transition network (ATN) to model multimedia presentations is presented in this paper. The inputs for ATNs are modeled by regular expressions. Regular expressions provide an efficient means for iconic indexing of the temporal/spatial relations of media streams and semantic objects. An ATN and its subnetworks are used to represent the appearing sequence of media streams and semantic objects. The arc label is a substring of a regular expression. In this design, a presentation is driven by a regular expression. User interactions, loops, and embedded presentations in multimedia presentations are also provided in ATNs. 1 Introduction Many semantic models have been proposed to model the temporal and spatial relations. Some of the semantic models developed in the recent past are graphical structures to model the multimedia presentations. Semantic models such as OCPN (Little and Ghafoor, 1990), MDS (Chang et al.,1995), Firefly (Buchanan and Zellw...