Multimedia applications: beyond similarity searches

Relational database systems solve many of the traditional problems for processing of structured data. However, unstructured data in the form of images, video, audio and multimedia is growing at a tremendous rate and introduces new requirements that are not met by today's database engines. One well known example is content-based retrieval that involves similarity searching and indexing in high-dimensional feature spaces. In addition there has been much recent focus on applying machine learning techniques involving semantics modeling, spatio-temporal indexing, multi-modal (audio-, visual-, textual-) integration and relevance feedback searching.