Efficient and reliable digital media archive for content-based retrieval

Recent years have witnessed a significant price reduction in many enabling technologies for wide-spread deployment of multimedia to desktop PCs and wo rkstations. This advancement has lead to an increasing demand for systems t hat can store, retrieve, and manipulate large volumes of multimedia informa tion. For a multimedia information system to better meet information users' needs, it must provide suitable access structures and methods. The answers to this demand fall into the research area of what most people called cont ent-based multimedia indexing and retrieval. Existing approaches to content -based indexing and retrieval have limitations. What we need is a digital-m edia-archiving system that is both efficient and reliable. By reliable, we mean that users should be able to retrieve documents that have the most pot ential for being relevant to their queries. On the other hand, an efficient digital-media-archiving system should provide an environment that allows h uman operators to create document indices without the need to manually watc h every multimedia object and enter keyword descriptions. This can be done by providing initial structure information of the video to the user, by gui ding the human operator through the indexing process, and by offering tools to create multiple media representations in a hierarchical structure.