Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in an Object-Oriented 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 which 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 necessary and cost-effective to complement content-based retrieval with high level (declarative) query-based retrieval in the video database system. As video objects by their nature are rich in spatial and temporal semantics, in this paper, we present a video database modeling mechanism, in which it supports spatial and temporal semantics and it has the capability to support spatio-temporal reasoning, along with its associated language facilities which can accommodate a wide range of video queries and annotation activities.