Facilitating Spatio-Temporal Operations in a Versatile Video Database System

In a video database, large amount of information involving video, audio, and/or images needs to be stored and managed. Therefore, there is an important need for novel techniques and systems that can provide an efficient retrieval facility of the voluminous data stored in the video database. While "content-based" retrieval provides a direct and an intuitive approach for video data access, it is inadequate from efficient video data management viewpoint. This is because many (semantic) features of video data can not be extracted out from the video itself automatically; moreover, video objects may share annotations or descriptions. Consequently, it is n ecessary and cost-effective to complement content-based retrieval with high level (declarative) query-based retrieval in the video dat ab se system. As video objects by their nature are rich in spatial and temporal semantics, in this paper, we present a versatile video database modeling mechanism, in which it supports spatial and temporal semantics, along with the Spatio-Temporal Operations and the associated query language facilities that can accommodate a wide range of video queries.