A Database Approach for Modeling and Querying Video Data

Indexing video data is essential for providing content based access. In this paper, we consider how database technology can offer an integrated framework for modeling and querying video data. As many concerns in video (e.g., modeling and querying) are also found in databases, databases provide an interesting angle to attack many of the problems. From a video applications perspective, database systems provide a nice basis for future video systems. More generally, database research will provide solutions to many video issues even if these are partial or fragmented. From a database perspective, video applications provide beautiful challenges. Next generation database systems will need to provide support for multimedia data (e.g., image, video, audio). These data types require new techniques for their management (i.e., storing, modeling, querying, etc.). Hence new solutions are significant. This paper develops a data model and a rule-based query language for video content based indexing and retrieval. The data model is designed around the object and constraint paradigms. A video sequence is split into a set of fragments. Each fragment can be analyzed to extract the information (symbolic descriptions) of interest that can be put into a database. This database can then be searched to find information of interest. Two types of information are considered: (1) the entities (objects) of interest in the domain of a video sequence, (2) video frames which contain these entities. To represent these information, our data model allows facts as well as objects and constraints. We present a declarative, rule-based, constraint query language that can be used to infer relationships about information represented in the model. The language has a clear declarative and operational semantics. This work is a major revision and a consolidation of [12, 13].This is an extended version of the article in: 15th International Conference on Data Engineering, Sydney, Australia, 1999