Advances in high-performance computing, communication, and storage technologies, as well as emerging large-scale multimedia applications, have made the design and development of multimedia information systems one of the most challenging and important directions of research and development within computer science. | Image Databases Search and Retrieval of Digital Imagery Edited by Vittorio Castelli Lawrence D. Bergman Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Inc. ISBNs 0-471-32116-8 Hardback 0-471-22463-4 Electronic 7 Database Support for Multimedia Applications MICHAEL ORTEGA-BINDERBERGER KAUSHIK CHAKRABARTI University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Illinois SHARAD MEHROTRA University of California Irvine California INTRODUCTION Advances in high-performance computing communication and storage technologies as well as emerging large-scale multimedia applications have made the design and development of multimedia information systems one of the most challenging and important directions of research and development within computer science. The payoffs of a multimedia infrastructure are tremendous it enables many multibillion dollar-a-year application areas. Examples are medical information systems electronic commerce digital libraries such as multimedia data repositories for training education broadcast and entertainment special-purpose databases such as face or fingerprint databases for security and geographic information systems storing satellite images maps and so forth. An integral component of the multimedia infrastructure is a multimedia database management system. Such a system supports mechanisms to extract and represent the content of multimedia objects provides efficient storage of the content in the database supports content-based queries over multimedia objects and provides a seamless integration of the multimedia objects with the traditional information stored in existing databases. A multimedia database system consists of multiple components which provide the following functionalities Multimedia Object Representation. Techniques or models to succinctly represent both structure and content of multimedia objects in databases. Content Extraction. Mechanisms to automatically or semiautomatically extract meaningful features that capture the content of multimedia objects and .