Metadata for Distributed Visual Database Access

With the advances in multimedia technology and the popularization of the Internet, it is now possible to access a large number of image or video repositories (visual databases) distributed throughout the world. To facilitate such access, a challenging problem is how the capability of each database can be adequately summarized to enable the query distributing server to perform an intelligent selection of relevant databases. In this paper, we investigate the metadata needed to support intelligent site selection over Internet that is geared towards handling visual content-based queries. The capability of each database is summarized using image templates as mediums of visual abstractions. We have designed a metadata architecture that includes four basic components: metadata collector, metadatabase, template builder, and metadata refinement module. The collector gathers the metadata from visual databases. The metadatabase houses the metadata and templates needed for database site selection. The template builder organizes and creates image templates. Finally, the refinement module updates the metadata. The metadata architecture is implemented in a web-based multimedia information retrieval environment. Copyright 1997 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.