BilVideo: a video database management system

The BilVideo video database management system provides integrated support for spatiotemporal and semantic queries for video. A knowledge base, consisting of a fact base and a comprehensive rule set implemented in Prolog, handles spatio-temporal queries. These queries contain any combination of conditions related to direction, topology, 3D relationships, object appearance, trajectory projection, and similarity-based object trajectories. The rules in the knowledge base significantly reduce the number of facts representing the spatio-temporal relations that the system needs to store. A feature database stored in an object-relational database management system handles semantic queries. To respond to user queries containing both spatio-temporal and semantic conditions, a query processor interacts with the knowledge base and object-relational database and integrates the results returned from these two system components. Because of space limitations, we only discuss the Web-based visual query interface and its fact-extractor and video-annotator tools. These tools populate the system's fact base and feature database to support both query types.