Video Database Systems

Principal Investigator: Ahmed K. Elmagarmid

Research Assistants: H. Jiang, M. Hammad, J. Huang

Sponsors: Intel, IBM, PRF

A video database management system can be defined as a software system that manages a collection of video data and provides content-based access to users. In this project we address the following important issues:

1. Video data modeling deals with the issue of representing the video data, that is, designing the high-level abstraction of the raw video to facilitate various operations. These operations include video data insertion, editing, indexing, browsing, and querying.
2. Video data insertion deals with the issue of introducing new video data into a video database. This usually includes following steps: 1) Key information (or features) extraction from video data for instantiating a data model; 2) Video scene analysis and segmentation; 3) Video annotation; 4) Index and store video data into the video database based on the extracted information and the annotated information about video data.
3. Video data query and retrieval deals with the extraction of video data from the database that satisfies certain user-specified query conditions. Due to the nature of video data, those query conditions are usually ambiguous in that the video data satisfying the query condition are not unique.
4. A prototype system allowing users to perform video queries based on semantic content and spatio-temporal characteristics has been built. Using this system, users can also efficiently browse video databases using video hyperlinks.