A multimedia database system deals with the storage, manipulation and retrieval of all types of digitally representable information objects such as text, still images, video and audio [1]. Providing mechanisms that allow the user to retrieve desired multimedia information by their semantic content is now an important issue in multimedia databases (see e.g. the standardization of Multi Description Schemes (MDS) of MPEG-7 [8]). However, current prototypes (e.g. Oracle 8i interMedia, Informix Datablade Modules) index mostly only low-level features of multimedia objects, usually not encoded into attributes provided by the database schema. Therefore special techniques are needed for semantic indexing and retrieval of multimedia objects [2].
In this context we present the SMOOTH system, a prototype of a distributed multimedia database system. It implements an integrated querying, annotating, and navigating framework relying on a generic video indexing model. The framework allows the structuring of videos into logical and physical units, and the annotation of these units by typed semantic objects. An index-database stores these structural and semantic information. We provide further a clear concept for capturing and querying the semantic content of multimedia objects, their correlation with low-level objects, as well as their spatio-temporal relationships.
The remainder is organized as follows. Section 2 states the significance of the contribution. Section 3 describes the demonstrated prototype SMOOTH. Finally section 4 explains what is intended to be demonstrated at VLDB 2001.