Multimedia

Multimedia Database Management Systems

Format: Hardcover
Author: Guojun Lu
ReleaseDate: October, 1999
Publisher: Artech House Publishers
Rating:

Book covers much ground using many disciplines
Whenever the author is discussing matters of text retrieval or simple issues such as moment calculations, he will go into great detail. This book on multimedia database systems sometimes covers issues at a low level, sometimes at a high level. If he is discussing the more complex issue of audio information indexing or compression algorithms, the discussion will be at a very high level. The vast majority of this book is not about database design at all, but is more a smorgasbord of all of the accompanying issues. For example, chapter 2 discusses a large variety of compression algorithms, with each technique getting very brief treatment. Chapters 4 through 7 discuss, also very briefly, most of the features used for indexing and retrieving text, audio, image, and video respectively. For example, there is a brief mention of shape descriptors in the chapter on image indexing and retrieval. Chapters 8 through 11 are where most of the information on integrating all of the individual issues into one coherent database scheme occur, but these chapters are not very clear in their suggestions or solutions. Chapter 12 discusses emerging technologies in multimedia database systems, but since this book was written in 1999, this chapter is not very useful.
In summary, this book is good at collecting the issues involved for indexing and retrieving each type of multimedia, but when it comes to integrating the solutions, it somewhat misses the mark. It is way too expensive for what you are ultimately getting in instruction. If you are doing research on this issue, I would either pick it up used or see if you can find it in a library. A better choice on the core issues of multimedia database design minus so much of the signal and image processing material present in this book would be "Multimedia Database Management Systems" by Prabhakaran. It was written in 1996, but its content is still relevant.