A Hybrid Approach to Multimedia Database Systems through Integration of Semantics and Media-based Search

With the increasing interest in multimedia, researchers across various disciplines, in particular, the database community and image processing community, have teamed up to conduct research in building multimedia database systems through integration of available technologies in various areas. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid approach to multimedia database systems in which traditional database systems are augmented by added media-dependent modules to manipulate and search multimedia data. SEMCOG (SEMantics and COGnition-based image retrieval) is a multimedia database system based on this hybrid architecture. We use it as an example to illustrate how to design and implement a hybrid multimedia database system. We also give our experiences with prototyping SEMCOG and issues raised for future research.