Content-Based Access to Multimedia Information

The technical ability to generate volumes of digital multimedia data is becoming increasingly `mainstream' in today's electronic world. Online services create volumes of primarily textual information, such as news reports, product reviews, and email chronicles. Advances in digital video technology have given organizations the capability to amass visual records and produce collections of surveillance monitoring data streams. With this ability to generate and archive volumes of data comes the potential of deriving or recalling information and knowledge from these data histories. To effectively utilize the growing number of multimedia data repositories, there is a convergence in technologies from large-scale data management, semantic-oriented media (text, image, and video) understanding, and multi-source trend analysis. This convergence is not straightforward and introduces a significant challenge in construction solutions that offer scalable deployment with semantically rich quality. The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and its member companies carried out a study in 1997 to investigate the state of the art in technologies for annotating and manipulating lar