Similarity-based algebra for multimedia database systems

In database management systems, the need to integrate content-based image retrieval facilities has become one of the key issues. In this paper, we first illustrate the importance of such facilities with example queries and give an overview of the works done in similarity-based data retrieval. Then, we propose an image repository model that supports similarity-based operations on feature vector representations of images. Moreover, we introduce a new similarity-based algebra on image tables. Thus, we define novel similarity-based algebraic operators and study their properties. We also investigate the use of the novel operators in combination with the relational operators on image and relational tables. Finally, we study the query optimization issues.