Approach for video meta-data modeling and query processing

Multimedia databases have been the subject of extensive research for the last several years. In particular, semantic modeling of video data spurred tremendous interest and produced various formalisms for content-based retrieval of video data. In this paper, we propose the use of Hierarchical Petri-nets (HPN's) for multi-level representation of video data with each level consisting of an augmented Petri-net structure. We show how such representation is able to capture video data semantics, from very low level semantics such as scene change and object movements to higher level semantics involving high-level textual description of events. A Petri-net based method for query processing of multi-object spatio-temporal video-data queries is presented.