Designing of Multimedia Databases

Many inherent characteristics of multimedia data have direct and indirect impacts on the design of multimedia databases. These include : the huge size of MMDBs, temporal nature, richness of content, complexity of representation and subjective interpretation. The major challenges in designing multimedia databases arise from several requirements they need to satisfy such as the following:
- Manage different types of input, output, and storage devices.
- Handle a variety of data compression and storage formats.
- Support different computing platforms and operating systems.
- Integrate different data models.
- Offer a variety of user-friendly query systems suited to different kinds of media.
- Handle different kinds of indices.
- Develop measures of data similarity that correspond well with perceptual similarity.
- Provide transparent view of geographically distributed data.
- Adhere to real-time constraints for the transmission of media data.
- Synchronize different media types while presenting to user.

DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED WITH MULTIMEDIA DATABASES :
The difficulty of making these different types of multimedia databases readily accessible to humans is:
- The tremendous amount of bandwidth they consume.
- Creating Globally-accepted data-handling platforms, such as Joomla, and the special considerations that these new multimedia database structures require.
- Creating a Globally-accepted operating system, including applicable storage and resource management programs need to accommodate the vast Global multimedia information hunger.
- Multimedia databases need to take into accommodate various human interfaces to handle 3D-interactive objects, in an logically-perceived manner.
- Accommodating the vast resources required to utilize artificial intelligence to it's fullest potential- including computer sight and sound analysis methods.
- The historic relational databases do not conveniently support content-based searches for multimedia content.

Multimedia databases are essential for efficient management and effective use of huge amounts of data. The diversity of applications using multimedia data, the rapidly changing technology, and the inherent complexities in the semantic representation, interpretation and comparison for similarity pose many challenges. MMDBs are still in their infancy.

Introduction to Multimedia Databases

Multimedia data typically means digital images, audio, video, animation and graphics together with text data. The acquisition, generation, storage and processing of multimedia data in computers and transmission over networks have grown tremendously in the recent past. Multimedia data are blessed with a number of exciting features. They can provide more effective dissemination of information in science, engineering , medicine, modern biology, and social sciences. It also facilitates the development of new paradigms in distance learning, and interactive personal and group entertainment. It loosely fall into three main categories:
* Static media (time-independent, i.e. images and handwriting).
* Dynamic media (time-dependent, i.e. video and sound bytes).
* Dimensional media (i.e. 3D games or computer-aided drafting programs- CAD).

TYPES OF MULTIMEDIA DATABASES :
There are numerous different types of multimedia databases :
* The Authentication Multimedia Database (also known as a Verification Multimedia Database, i.e. retina scanning), is a 1:1 data comparison.
* The Identification Multimedia Database is a data comparison of one-to-many (i.e. passwords and personal identification numbers.
* A newly-emerging type of multimedia database, is the Biometrics Multimedia Database; which specializes in automatic human verification based on the algorithms of their behavioral or physiological profile.

CONTENTS OF MULTIMEDIA DATABASES :
A multimedia database needs to manage several different types of information pertaining to the actual multimedia data. They are:
* Media data - This is the actual data representing images, audio, video that are captured, digitized, processes, compressed and stored.
* Media format data - This contains information pertaining to the format of the media data after it goes through the acquisition, processing, and encoding phases. For instance, this consists of information such as the sampling rate, resolution, frame rate, encoding scheme etc.
* Media keyword data - This contains the keyword descriptions, usually relating to the generation of the media data. For example, for a video, this might include the date, time, and place of recording , the person who recorded, the scene that is recorded, etc This is also called as content descriptive data.
* Media feature data - This contains the features derived from the media data. A feature characterizes the media contents. For example, this could contain information about the distribution of colors, the kinds of textures and the different shapes present in an image. This is also referred to as content dependent data.