Optical associative processing for multimedia database applications

Multimedia database management systems require high capacity and performance from secondary storage in terms of fast and uninterrupted retrieval of data objects. In addition, responding to a user query in a timely manner by searching a huge database to retrieve relevant data objects is an important operation in a multimedia system. A variety of parallel optical storage techniques combine massive capacities with high data transfer rates. We present a volume holographic optical memory system that exhibits these desirable characteristics and can also operate as an associative processor. We investigate its potential in terms of three applications: (a) database management, where digital alphanumeric records are stored in the memory, (b) interactive video, where both digital and image data are stored in the memory, and (c) video indexing, where the stored information comprises a sample of frames from a video sequence. It is shown that the optical memory can search the data quickly and provide reliable results in most cases. Certain problems and possible improvements are also discussed.