SYMBOLIC DESCRIPTION AND VISUAL QUERYING OF IMAGE SEQUENCES USING SPATIOTEMPORAL LOGIC

The emergence of advanced multimedia applications is emphasizing the r elevance of retrieval by contents within databases of images and image sequences. Matching the inherent visuality of the Information stored in such databases, visual specification by example provides an effecti ve and natural way to express content-oriented queries. To support thi s querying approach, the system must be able to interpret example scen es reproducing the contents of images and sequences to be retrieved, a nd to match them against the actual contents of the database. In the a ccomplishment of this task, to avoid a direct access to raw image data , the system must be provided with an appropriate description language supporting the representation of the contents of pictorial data. An o riginal language for the symbolic representation of the contents of im age sequences is presented. This language, referred to as Spatio-tempo ral Logic, comprises a framework for the qualitative representation of the contents of image sequences, which allows for treatment and opera tion of content structures at a higher level than pixels or image feat ures. Organization and operation principles of a prototype system expl oiting Spatiotemporal Logic to support querying by example through vis ual iconic interaction are expounded.