A video stream management system for heterogeneous information integration environments

Massive data streams are obtained from various types of sources such as sensors, GPS and live cameras. Since demand for applications integrating multiple data streams and databases is increasing, we must consider an integration framework for heterogeneous information sources. Integrating numeric and text streams is comparatively easy, but integrating video streams and other sources is difficult because of the properties of video streams: highly-frequent, largevolume and complex binary data. Based on this background, we propose a video stream management system. The system provides a SQL-like query interface for heterogeneous information sources including video streams. To integrate video streams, we employ an abstract data type to hold a subsequence of video frames and functions to extract metadata from video data. Beyond that, we also propose a dynamic source selection scheme for some applications, like moving object tracking with video streams. The scheme is used when information sources to be accessed may change according to changes in user interest. Our system dynamically accesses necessary information sources and saves system resources by closing connections to unnecessary information sources.