Supporting content-based queries over images in MARS

While advances in technology allow us to generate, transmit and store large amounts of digital images, video and audio, research in the indexing and retrieval of multimedia information is still at its infancy. To address the challenges in building an effective multimedia database system, we have built the Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System (MARS) prototype. This paper summarises the retrieval subsystem of MARS and its support for content-based queries over image features. Content-based retrieval techniques have been extensively studied for textual documents in the area of automatic information retrieval. Our objective in MARS is to exploit these existing techniques for content-based retrieval over images and multimedia databases.