VIMS: A Video Information Management System

Abstract

Video data management is fast becoming one of the most important topics in multimedia databases. In this paper, we describe the development of an experimental video information management system, called "VIMS", being implemented at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, which employs two fundamental components - i) a Video Classification Component (VCC) for the generation of effective indices necessary for structuring the video data, and ii) a Conceptual Clustering Mechanism (CCM) having extended object-oriented features and techniques. By incorporating CCM concepts and techniques together with the classified features and indices generated from the VCC, the information management system enables users to form dynamically, among other things, video programs (or segments) from existing objects based on semantic features/index terms. A prototype of this system has been constructed, using a persistent object storage manager (viz., EOS), on Sun4 workstations.