Multimedia database

Last updated April 26, 2019

A Multimedia database (MMDB) is a collection of related multimedia data.^[1] The multimedia data include one or more primary media data types such as text, images, graphic objects (including drawings, sketches and illustrations) animation sequences, audio and video.

Multimedia is content that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content. Multimedia contrasts with media that use only rudimentary computer displays such as text-only or traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material.

Data is any sequence of one or more symbols given meaning by specific act(s) of interpretation.

An image is an artifact that depicts visual perception, such as a photograph or other two-dimensional picture, that resembles a subject—usually a physical object—and thus provides a depiction of it. In the context of signal processing, an image is a distributed amplitude of color(s).

A Multimedia Database Management System (MMDBMS) is a framework that manages different types of data potentially represented in a wide diversity of formats on a wide array of media sources. It provides support for multimedia data types, and facilitate for creation, storage, access, query and control of a multimedia database.^[2]

A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free and may be either unpublished or open.

Contents of MMDB

A Multimedia Database (MMDB) hosts one or more multimedia data types ^[3] (i.e. text, images, graphic objects, audio, video, animation sequences). These data types are broadly categorized into three classes:

Static media^[3] (time-independent: image and graphic object).
Dynamic media^[3] (time-dependent: audio, video and animation).
Dimensional media^[3](3D game and computer aided drafting programs).

Sound mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing; pressure wave, generated by vibrating structure

In physics, sound is a vibration that typically propagates as an audible wave of pressure, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.

Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode ray tube (CRT) systems which were later replaced by flat panel displays of several types.

Animation Method of creating moving pictures

Animation is a method in which pictures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets or clay figures.

Comparison of multimedia data types

Medium	Elements	Time-dependence
Text	Printable characters	No
Graphic	Vectors, regions	No
Image	Pixels	No
Audio	Sound, Volume	Yes
Video	Raster images, graphics	Yes

Additionally, a Multimedia Database (MMDB) needs to manage additional information pertaining to the actual multimedia data. The information is about the following:

Media data: the actual data representing an object.
Media format data: information about the format of the media data after it goes through the acquisition, processing, and encoding phases.
Media keyword data: the keyword descriptions, usually relating to the generation of the media data.
Media feature data: content dependent data such as contain information about the distribution of colours, the kinds of textures and the different shapes present in an image.

The last three types are called metadata as they describe several different aspects of the media data. The media keyword data and media feature data are used as indices for searching purpose. The media format data is used to present the retrieved information.

Metadata is "data [information] that provides information about other data". Many distinct types of metadata exist, among these descriptive metadata, structural metadata, administrative metadata, reference metadata and statistical metadata.

In a computer language, a reserved word is a word that cannot be used as an identifier, such as the name of a variable, function, or label – it is "reserved from use". This is a syntactic definition, and a reserved word may have no meaning.

An index is a list of words or phrases ('headings') and associated pointers ('locators') to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document or collection of documents. Examples are an index in the back matter of a book and an index that serves as a library catalog.

Requirements of Multimedia databases

Like the traditional databases, Multimedia databases should address the following requirements:

Integration
- Data items do not need to be duplicated for different programs invocations
Data independence
- Separate the database and the management from the application programs
Concurrency control
- Allows concurrent transactions
Persistence
- Data objects can be saved and re-used by different transactions and program invocations
Privacy
- Access and authorization control
Integrity control
- Ensures database consistency between transactions
Recovery
- Failures of transactions should not affect the persistent data storage
Query support
- Allows easy querying of multimedia data

Multimedia databases should have the ability to uniformly query data (media data, textual data) represented in different formats and have the ability to simultaneously query different media sources and conduct classical database operations across them. (Query support)

They should have the ability to retrieve media objects from a local storage device in a good manner. (Storage support)

They should have the ability to take the response generated by a query and develop a presentation of that response in terms of audio-visual media and have the ability to deliver this presentation. (Presentation and delivery support)

Issues and challenges

Multimedia data consists of a variety of media formats or file representations including TIFF, BMP, PPT, IVUE, FPX, JPEG, MPEG, AVI, MID, WAV, DOC, GIF, EPS, PNG, etc. Because of restrictions on the conversion from one format to the other, the use of the data in a specific format has been limited as well. Usually, the data size of multimedia is large such as video; therefore, multimedia data often require a large storage.
Multimedia database consume a lot of processing time, as well as bandwidth.
Some multimedia data types such as video, audio, and animation sequences have temporal requirements that have implications on their storage, manipulation and presentation, but images, video and graphics data have special constraints in terms of their content.

Application areas

Examples of multimedia database application areas:

Digital Libraries
News-on-Demand
Video-on-Demand
Music database
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Telemedicine

Related Research Articles

A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are often developed using formal design and modeling techniques.

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language ) is a World Wide Web Consortium recommended Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language to describe multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things. SMIL allows presenting media items such as text, images, video, audio, links to other SMIL presentations, and files from multiple web servers. SMIL markup is written in XML, and has similarities to HTML.

MPEG-7 is a multimedia content description standard. It was standardized in ISO/IEC 15938. This description will be associated with the content itself, to allow fast and efficient searching for material that is of interest to the user. MPEG-7 is formally called Multimedia Content Description Interface. Thus, it is not a standard which deals with the actual encoding of moving pictures and audio, like MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. It uses XML to store metadata, and can be attached to timecode in order to tag particular events, or synchronise lyrics to a song, for example.

A presentation program is a software package used to display information in the form of a slide show. It has three major functions: an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted, a method for inserting and manipulating graphic images, and a slide-show system to display the content. Presentation software can be viewed as enabling a functionally-specific category of electronic media, with its own distinct culture and practices as compared to traditional presentation media.

The Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) is a file format for professional cross-platform data interchange, designed for the video post-production and authoring environment. It was created by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), and is now being standardized through the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

WinFS was the code name for a canceled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files, audio files, or character encoding. This is usually done in cases where a target device does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.

Operations on a collection of digital assets requires the use of a computer application implementing digital asset management (DAM) to ensure that the owner, and possibly their delegates, can perform operations on the data files.

A container or wrapper format is a metafile format whose specification describes how different elements of data and metadata coexist in a computer file.

A video search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers. Some engines also allow users to search by video format type and by length of the clip. The video search results are usually accompanied by a thumbnail view of the video.

Multimedia search enables information search using queries in multiple data types including text and other multimedia formats. Multimedia search can be implemented through multimodal search interfaces, i.e., interfaces that allow to submit search queries not only as textual requests, but also through other media. We can distinguish two methodologies in multimedia search:

Oracle Multimedia is a feature available for Oracle databases, which provides multimedia utilities in a database environment, generating as a result a multimedia database (MMDB).

Media Foundation (MF) is a COM-based multimedia framework pipeline and infrastructure platform for digital media in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. It is the intended replacement for Microsoft DirectShow, Windows Media SDK, DirectX Media Objects (DMOs) and all other so-called "legacy" multimedia APIs such as Audio Compression Manager (ACM) and Video for Windows (VfW). The existing DirectShow technology is intended to be replaced by Media Foundation step-by-step, starting with a few features. For some time there will be a co-existence of Media Foundation and DirectShow. Media Foundation will not be available for previous Windows versions, including Windows XP.

Graphics Animation System for Professionals software

GRaphic Animation System for Professionals (GRASP) was the first multimedia animation program for the IBM PC family of computers. It was also at one time the most widely used animation format.

Camtasia is a software suite, created and published by TechSmith, for creating video tutorials and presentations directly via screencast, or via a direct recording plug-in to Microsoft PowerPoint. The screen area to be recorded can be chosen freely, and audio or other multimedia recordings may be recorded at the same time or added separately from any other source and integrated in the Camtasia component of the product. Both versions of Camtasia started as enhanced screen capture programs and have evolved to integrate screen capture and post-processing tools targeted at the educational and information multimedia development marketplace.

A Visual Search Engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, other images and other types of documents. This type of search engines is mostly used to search on the mobile Internet through an image of an unknown object. Examples are buildings in a foreign city. These search engines often use techniques for Content Based Image Retrieval.

ISO base media file format defines a general structure for time-based multimedia files such as video and audio. The identical text is published as ISO/IEC 15444-12.

A Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is a medical imaging technology in which images and documents are stored (archived) in a standard format with a standard interface, such that they can be accessed in a vendor-neutral manner by other systems.

References

↑ Yu, Chien; Teri Brandenburg (February 2011). "Multimedia database applications: issues and concerns for classroom teaching" (PDF). 3 (1): 2. Retrieved May 28, 2014.
↑ Adjeroh, Donald; Nwosu, Kingsley (1997). "Multimedia Database Management - Requirements and Issues" (PDF). IEEE Multimedia. 4 (3): 1. Retrieved 28 May 2014.
1 2 3 4 "Multimedia Database". Tech-faq.com. Retrieved 4 May 2014.

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[MDA-1] Yu, Chien; Teri Brandenburg (February 2011). "Multimedia database applications: issues and concerns for classroom teaching" (PDF). 3 (1): 2. Retrieved May 28, 2014.

[MDMRI-2] Adjeroh, Donald; Nwosu, Kingsley (1997). "Multimedia Database Management - Requirements and Issues" (PDF). IEEE Multimedia. 4 (3): 1. Retrieved 28 May 2014.

[MD-3] 1 2 3 4 "Multimedia Database". Tech-faq.com. Retrieved 4 May 2014.