Accommodating hybrid retrieval in a comprehensive video database management system

A comprehensive video retrieval system should be able to accommodate and utilize various (complementary) description data in facilitating effective retrieval. We advocate a hybrid retrieval approach by integrating a query-based (database) mechanism with content-based retrieval (CBR) functions. We describe the VideoMAP/sup +/ architecture, discuss issues related to developing such a comprehensive video database management system, and its specific language mechanism (CAROL/ST with CBR) which provides an improved expressive power than pure query-based or CBR methods currently offer. We also describe an experimental prototype being developed based on a commercial object-oriented toolkit using VC++ and Java.