Multimedia Analysis and Retreival System Project (MARS)

			Sharad Mehrotra 
		Computer Science Department
	    http://http://fozzy.cs.uiuc.edu:2020

The goal of the  MARS project is  the design  and development  of next
generation information systems    that  provides seamless  access   to
multimedia information  based on its   rich internal content.   Due to
many fundamental limitations   of  retrieving multimedia   information
based solely on textual annotations, we  have adopted a vision centric
approach in   which objects  are  represented  and retrieved based  on
low-level visual features (e.g., color,  texture, layout, etc).  These
visual properties may  be  extracted automatically  from  images/video
making   the  approach scalable to  large    as well as  heterogeneous
multimedia collections. 

Supporting content-based  queries  over visual feature representations
poses many significant  challenges  to existing practice   of database
management (DBMS)  and information     retrieval (IR).  Existing    IR
techniques that  deal primarily with  textual  information need to  be
generalized  to support  content-based   retrieval  over   multimedia.
Furthermore,  since visual  feature   representations define   complex
non-euclidean vector   spaces,  techniques need  to    be developed to
support such complex  multidimensional information in  DBMSs.  Another
challenge   is  to integrate   multimedia  IR  techniques with  DBMSs.
Problem arises since existing DBMSs do not have any native support for
storage and processing   of imprecise information  while content-based
retrieval is inherently imprecise. 

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the  progress we have made
in addressing the above  problems in supporting multimedia information
in DBMSs  and our research  directions.  If time  permits, I will also
show   the applicability of  our research  in  DBMSs  and  IR to other
complex   applications  dealing with  imprecision  and spatio-temporal
information.