Image Database Management

Publisher Summary Contemporary database management systems are devised to give users a seamless and transparent view into the data landscape being managed. Such programs give users the illusion that their view of the data corresponds to the way that it is actually internally represented, as if they were the only users of the software. Image database management system was conceived as a way of managing images for image algorithm development test beds. Images were retrieved based on information in header files, which contained only textual information. The architecture of a standard database management system is usually divided into three different levels, corresponding to the ANSI/SPARC standard. These levels are the physical database level, the conceptual database level, and the external database level. The implementation-independent framework that is employed to describe a database at the logical and external level is called a data model. These models represent the subject database in terms of entities, entity types, attributes of entities, operations on entities and entity types, and relationships among entities and entity types. An image data model must represent the following types of information: the model base, the model-base instantiation, the instantiation-object connection, and the object information repository. The chapter discusses some examples of the existing image database management systems classifying them as first, second, and third generation database systems. It also focuses on the similarity retrieval in image database systems.