Integrated video and text for content-based access to video databases

This paper introduces a new approach to realize video databases. The approach consists of a VideoText data model based on free text annotations associated with logical video segments and a corresponding query language. Traditional database techniques are inadequate for exploiting queries on unstructured data such as video, supporting temporal queries, and ranking query results according to their relevance to the query. In this paper, we propose to use information retrieval techniques to provide such features and to extend the query language to accommodate interval queries that are particularly suited to video data. Algorithms are provided to show how user queries are evaluated. Finally, a generic and modular video database architecture which is based on VideoText data model is described.