Digital Media Warehouse Systems - Querying a National Multimedia
Database
by Martin Kersten
CWI has started research aiming at the advance of content-based
retrieval techniques in a large multimedia database. It is a cooperative
effort under the umbrella of the recently founded national Telematics
Institute, in which several knowledge institutions and industries
participate. Other partners are the University of Twente, KPN
and Syllogic. CWI also manages the project.
Optimal exploitation of the information contained in such a database,
or Digital Media Warehouse (DMW), requires strategic and fundamental
research in several fields of telematics. The project is focused
on the system architectural needs for querying a DMW, in the context
of video and audio service directories.
Searching information in a DMW is often not fixed in its form,
but requires browsing interaction and proximity queries to find
a satisfactory solution. But how can the owner of a DMW efficiently
organize and disclose its content if he can not anticipate the
storage, communication and query characteristics to optimize its
architecture? In particular, a large portion of the database resides
in semi-structured archives (Web-pages).Whereas (manual) indexing
cannot be handled economically, automatic indexing multimedia
is still an unsolved problem.
In areas such as computer vision, image processing, multi-media
authoring, and information retrieval, the aim is to develop feature
detectors as building blocks for content-based indexing, interpretation,
and classification. The novelty, and prime objective of the present
project, lies in developing an adaptive system architecture allowing
growth and easy access of multi-terabyte databases stored globally.
This encompasses a reference framework for feature detectors extracting
relevant feature values from different kinds of multimedia objects,
a database architecture for their storage, and query techniques
for semi-structured data. The DMW project is unique in that it
combines these pieces for support of content-based retrieval in
an integrated and scalable solution.
The DMW research aligns with the national project Amis, directed
at multimedia indexing and content-based search, in which CWI
develops the Acoi database containing a large collection of multimedia
objects, that acts as a national experimentation platform, and
with the national HPCN projects Jera (large-scale webservers)
and IMPACT (high-performance database architectures).
Acoi’s initial release is geared at provision of one million still
images, hundreds of video sequences, and thousands of audio tracks.
This large multimedia database is subsequently indexed using feature
extraction algorithms published in the literature and developed
by the partners in the various affiliated research projects. The
prime demonstrator is the Acoi search engine. The database is
built under Monet, our extensible database system with demonstrated
high performance. The hardware platform is an SGI O2000 computer
with 16 CPUs at 250Mhz, 8 Gbyte ram, and 150 Gbyte disk space.
The system is hooked into the communication infrastructure using
4 x 150 Mbyte ATM links.
The envisioned DMW architecture for experimentation consists of
three layers of activity:
- storage and WWW access, built around the Monet database system
- query and feature detection, comprising two components dealing
- roughly speaking - with DMW input and output - applications
to highlight and exploit various aspects of the platform.
More information on website: http://www.cwi.nl/~acoi/DMW/index.html
Please contact:
Martin Kersten - CWI / University of Amsterdam
Tel:+31 20 592 4066
E-mail: Martin.Kersten@cwi.nl
