Support to content-based image query in object-oriented databases

This paper presents an Object Manager that stores medical images as a data type of attributes that can be associated to objects, and a support system developed to offer this kind of tool to medical application developers. The purpose of this work is to support the retrieval of images through queries based on the graphical contents of stored images. The usual approach uses icons and textual attributes stored with the images to specify queries. This work uses a novel modeling technique to define the "image data type", by means of which it is possible to decide, before the query itself, the key data of each image that must be extracted from the image when it is stored in the database, allowing faster search when queries are issued. This approach enables building of expansible systems, where new image processing algorithms can be added easily, using its syntactic representation stored through an Image Meta-schema into the application database schema. This work shows how such a system has been implemented, and also a query language used to refer and execute these algorithms from inside the database management system. Pemfission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without t~:e provided that copies ,are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of ACM, Inc. To copy othe~vise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specilic permission and/or a l~,e. ~-3 1998 ACM 0-89791-969-6/98/0002 3.50 2 4 1