Model-Driven Design of Audiovisual Indexing Processes for Search-Based Applications

As the Web becomes a platform for multimedia content fruition, audiovisual search assumes a central role in providing users with the content most adequate to their information needs. A key issue for enabling audiovisual search is extracting indexable knowledge from opaque media. Such a process is heavily constrained by scalability and performance issues and must be able to flexibly incorporate specialized components for educing selected features from media elements. This paper shows how the use of a model-driven approach can help designers specify multimedia indexing processes, verify properties of interest in such processes, and generate the code that orchestrates the components, so as to enable rapid prototyping of content analysis processes in presence of evolving requirements.