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AssigneeCommissariat a l'Energie Atomique
InventorsHassane Essafi, Michel-Pierre Gayrard, Marc Pic, Pascal Adam
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The management system comprises a set of specialized operational units with an acquisition module, a multimedia database, indexing and search agents that can be subdivided into subagents, an agent dedicated to managing information relating to the structure of documents, a module for analyzing and structuring document components, a user interface including a document indexing interface and a document search interface, a module for creating a multimedia database, and a module for opening a session. The management system also comprises a set of specialized functional units with an agent for arranging the various units of the system, agents for driving document indexing and searching, and an identifier manager. A platform provides interconnection and intercommunication between the specialized operational functional units.
1/ A system for managing a multimedia database, the system being characterized in that it comprises:
2/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that said indexing agent that can be subdivided into at least two subagents is an agent serving to index objects of image type, and in that said search agent that can be subdivided into at least two subagents is an agent serving to search for objects of image type.
3/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that said module for analyzing the content of an input multimedia document and for extracting the structure of document components comprises a first unit for processing and analyzing an image or a signal, for statistical analysis, for modelling, and for classification to group together the elements of an input document into homogeneous components, and a unit for producing the structure of the document or an object graph establishing the relationships between the various components of the document.
4/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that it includes an indexing agent for indexing objects of text type and a search agent for searching for objects of text type.
5/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that it includes an indexing agent for indexing objects of sound type and a search agent for searching for objects of sound type.
6/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that it includes an analysis agent for extracting image objects, sound objects, and objects characterizing the dynamic behavior thereof, an indexing agent for indexing video type objects, and a search agent for searching for video type objects.
7/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that the multimedia database comprises both references to documents to be archived and composite signatures constituted by characterizing components of archived documents and by descriptions of the structure of archived documents identifying the relationships between the components of archived documents.
8/ A system according to claim 1, characterized in that it comprises a plurality of modules for analyzing the content of an input multimedia document and for extracting and structuring components of the document, each of these modules for analyzing contents, extraction, and structuring being adapted to a specific type of document identified by the nature of its content (image, text, sound, video).
9/ A method of managing a multimedia database, the method being characterized in that it comprises the following steps:
10/ A method according to claim 9, characterized in that while searching for a previously indexed and stored multimedia document, during the processing of homogeneous requests, the response returned by a search agent is constituted by a sequence of triplets each comprising: