Loading patent…
AssigneePhilips Electronics North America Corporation
InventorsGandhimathi Vaithilingam, Mohamed S. Abdel-Mottaleb
Estimating the term…
Multimedia information retrieval is performed using meta-descriptors in addition to descriptors. A “descriptor” is a representation of a feature, a “feature” being a distinctive characteristic of multimedia information, while a “meta-descriptor” is information about the descriptor. Meta-descriptors are generated for multimedia information in a repository (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24) by extracting the descriptors from the multimedia information (111), clustering the multimedia information based on the descriptors (112), assigning meta-descriptors to each cluster (113), and attaching the meta-descriptors to the multimedia information in the repository (114). The multimedia repository is queried by formulating a query using query-by-example (131), acquiring the descriptor/s and meta-descriptor/s for a repository multimedia item (132), generating a query descriptor/s if none of the same type has been previously generated (133, 134), comparing the descriptors of the repository multimedia item and the query multimedia item (135), and ranking and displaying the results (136, 137).
A method of representing a plurality of multimedia information, comprising:
A method of searching multimedia information in a repository described by descriptors using a query multimedia information item, comprising:
A method of retrieving multimedia information from a repository, comprising:
A data structure for representing information about a plurality of descriptors that are representations of features of an item of multimedia information belonging to a particular category of multimedia content, comprising a plurality of data elements indicating relevancy of the descriptors in describing the item of multimedia information.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.