Mapping, indexing and querying of MPEG-7 descriptors and description schemes

Abstract

MPEG-7 is a promising standard for the description of multimedia content. Today, more and more multimedia applications based on MPEG-7 descriptions have been set up for research, commercial and industrial applications. Therefore, an efficient storage solution for large amounts of MPEG-7 descriptions is certainly desirable. However, few existing works focus on a comprehensive MPEG-7 descriptions management system. Although the MPEG-7 descriptions are also the XML documents, the current database solutions for XML documents do not fulfill all the requirements for the management of MPEG-7 descriptions. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the MPEG-7 descriptions storage solution and present the implementation of an MPEG-7 descriptions management system: IXMMS, which is based on RDBMS and ORDBMS. IXMMS is a novel XML storage solution to overcome the problems in the current XML storage solutions for the management of MPEG-7 descriptions. The design of IXMMS pays attention to both multimedia information exchange and multimedia data manipulation. IXMMS introduces two separate databases, one to store MPEG-7 descriptions from the XML perspective, and the other for the low-level multimedia content within the MPEG-7 descriptors. Thus, IXMMS supports the management of MPEG-7 descriptions and MPEG-7 information exchange not only from the XML perspective, but also from the multimedia perspective, and its features can reach the most critical requirements for the MPEG-7 documents storage and management. In IXMMS, we propose a novel XML storage approach, called SM3, for the MPEG-7 documents storage solution. As a kind of data-centric XML documents, MPEG-7 descriptions can be stored in the relational DBMS for efficient and effective management. The approaches of storing XML data in relational DBMS can be classified into two classes of storage model: schema-conscious and schema-oblivious. The schema-conscious