Multimedia Databases and Data Management: A Survey

The exponential growth of the technological advancements has resulted in high-resolution devices, such as digital cameras, scanners, monitors, and printers, which enable the capturing and displaying of multimedia data in high-density storage devices. Furthermore, more and more applications need to live with multimedia data. However, the gap between the characteristics of various media types and the application requirements has created the need to develop advanced techniques for multimedia data management and the extraction of relevant information from multimedia databases. Though many research efforts have been devoted to the areas of multimedia databases and data management, it is still far from maturity. The purpose of this article is to discuss how the existing techniques, methodologies, and tools addressed relevant issues and challenges to enable a better understanding in multimedia databases and data management. The focuses include: 1 how to develop a formal structure that can be used to capture the distinguishing content of the media data in a multimedia database MMDB and to form an abstract space for the data to be queried; 2 how to develop advanced content analysis and retrieval techniques that can be used to bridge the gaps between the semantic meaning and low-level media characteristics to improve multimedia information retrieval; and 3 how to develop query mechanisms that can handle complex spatial, temporal, and/or spatio-temporal relationships of multimedia data to answer the imprecise and incomplete queries issued to an MMDB.