Multimedia Representation

In recent years, the rapid expansion of multimedia applications, partly due to the exponential growth of the Internet, has proliferated over the daily life of computer users (Yang & Hurson, 2006). The integration of wireless communication, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous data processing with multimedia database systems has enabled the connection and fusion of distributed multimedia data sources. In addition, the emerging applications, such as smart classroom, digital library, habitat/environment surveillance, traffic monitoring, and battlefield sensing, have provided increasing motivation for conducting research on multimedia content representation, data delivery and dissemination, data fusion and analysis, and contentbased retrieval. Consequently, research on multimedia technologies is of increasing importance in computer society. In contrast with traditional text-based systems, multimedia applications usually incorporate much more powerful descriptions of human thought—video, audio, and images (Karpouzis, Raouzaiou, Tzouveli, Iaonnou, & Kollias, 2003; Liu, Bao, Yu, & Xu, 2005; Yang & Hurson, 2005). Moreover, the large collections of data in multimedia systems make it possible to resolve more complex data operations such as imprecise query or content-based retrieval. For instance, the image database systems may accept an example picture and return the most similar images of the example (Cox, Miller, & Minka, 2000; Hsu, Chua, & Pung, 2000; Huang, Chang, & Huang, 2003). However, the conveniences of multimedia applications come with challenges to the existing data management schemes: