Database Query

Sinan Ingec, Gozde Bozdagi
 

Due to the recent developments in hardware and software, it becomes much more easier to generate, process and store electronic information. Being only text at the beginning, this electronic information now includes graphics, images, animations, video, audio and other multimedia data at an increasing rate every year. Most of this information can be accessed through WEB by the help of high speed networks, search engines and browsing tools. However, most queries result in many retrieved documents, only some of which are relevant. In case of multimedia data the problem is even worse. Since traditional methods of retrieving multimedia information depend on a number of descriptive keywords given to the data by the person indexing it, these methods are inefficient. Due to this fact, content based retrieval of digital imagery became an active area of research in the field of database management.

Another issue in search of information from large multimedia databases is that, the interface should be user friendly and highly interactive. Also the system should be able to work on different platforms for wide accessibility. The tools that are found in the literature for content based indexing and retrieval are mostly based on JAVA and CGI-BIN applications. Hovewer these technologies have drawbacks which make the tools either slow or reach a limited group of users. The disadvantage of CGI-BIN applications is that the executable codes must be put in a specified place where every user does not have the write permission wheras JAVA has the disadvantage of slow execution time because of applet’s execution in the client side.

In this work, we propose a new database access, search and browsing tool based on ASP (Active Server Pages) where the gateway to database is achieved using ADO (ActiveX Data Objects). ASP is a new technology developed by Microsoft which brings a revolutionary vision for the WEB programming and solves the above mentioned problems [5]. The main idea is that the code runs on the server machine and the resulting HTML coded page is sent to the client machine. It also provides an ODBC connection to any database system which is available on the server PC. Also, since a simple HTML coded page is sent to the client side, any browser can be used to see the results of the retrieval process.

The database search is done by using color based features in the proposed system. Each image has an associated feature vector composed of mean, area and center of mass of the dominant color regions. These feature vectors are processed by the .asm code where comparison is done based on a library of matching algorithm the tool provides.