Content-based retrieval of video data with flexibly managed attributes

摘要

Various types of information can be mixed in a continuous video stream without any clear boundary. For this reason, there seems to be no simple solution to support content-based queries in a video database. The meaning of a video scene can be interpreted by multiple levels of abstraction and its description can be varied among different users. Therefore, it is important for a user to be able to describe a scene flexibly while the description given by different users should be maintained consistently. This paper proposes an effective way to represent the different types of video information in the conventional relational database model. Flexibly defined attributes and their values are organized as tree-structured dictionaries while the description of video data is stored in a fixed database schema. In order to assist a user, two browsing methods are introduced. The dictionary browser simplifies the annotation process as well as the querying process of a user while the result browser can help a user analyze the results of a query in terms of various combinations of query conditions.