Release 9.0.1
Part Number A88785-01
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| Oracle interMedia Java Classes User's Guide and Reference Release 9.0.1 Part Number A88785-01 |
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Oracle interMedia provides Java Classes to enable users to write Java applications using interMedia objects.
The capabilities of interMedia objects include the storage, retrieval, management, and manipulation of multimedia data managed by Oracle9i. Oracle interMedia supports multimedia storage, retrieval, and management of the following:
interMedia is a building block for various multimedia applications rather than being an end-user application. It consists of object types along with related methods for managing and processing multimedia data. Some example applications that could use interMedia objects are the following:
This section contains information about digitized audio concepts and using interMedia audio services to build audio applications or specialized interMedia audio objects.
interMedia audio services integrate the storage, retrieval, and management of digitized audio data in Oracle databases using Oracle9i.
Audio may be produced by an audio recorder, an audio source such as a microphone, digitized audio, other specialized audio recording devices, or even by program algorithms. Audio recording devices take an analog or continuous signal, such as the sound picked up by a microphone or sound recorded on magnetic media, and convert it into digital values with specific audio characteristics. Such characteristics include format, encoding type, number of channels, sampling rate, sample size, compression type, and audio duration.
Digitized audio consists of the audio data (digitized bits) and attributes that describe and characterize the audio data. Audio applications sometimes associate application-specific information, such as the description of the audio clip, date recorded, author or artist, and so forth, with audio data by storing descriptive text in an attribute or column in the database table.
The audio data can have different formats, encoding types, compression types, numbers of channels, sampling rates, sample sizes, and playing times (duration) depending upon how the audio data was digitally recorded. interMedia audio services can store and retrieve audio data of any data format, and automatically extract metadata from audio data of a variety of popular audio formats. interMedia audio services can also extract application attributes and store them in the comments field of the object in XML form, identical to what is provided by Oracle interMedia Annotator. Supported audio attributes depend upon available hardware capabilities or processing power for any user-defined formats. See Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference for a list of supported data formats from which interMedia audio services can extract and store attributes and other audio features.
interMedia audio services are extensible and can support additional audio formats.
The size of digitized audio (number of bytes) tends to be large compared to traditional computer objects, such as numbers and text. Therefore, several encoding schemes are used that squeeze audio data into fewer bytes, thus putting a smaller load on storage devices and networks.
This section contains information about using the interMedia OrdDoc object to build applications or specialized interMedia objects.
OrdDoc integrates the storage, retrieval, and management of multimedia files in Oracle databases using Oracle9i.
Text documents may be produced by application software, text conversion utilities, speech-to-text processing software, and so forth. Text documents can be ASCII text files or binary files formatted by a particular application.
In addition to text documents, an interMedia OrdDoc object can store audio, image, and video data in a database column. Instead of having separate columns for audio, image, text, and video objects, you can use one column of interMedia OrdDoc objects to represent all types of multimedia.
Multimedia files consist of the multimedia data (digitized bits) and attributes that describe and characterize the data.
interMedia OrdDoc objects can store and retrieve multimedia data of any data format. The OrdDoc object type can be used in applications that require you to store different types of multimedia data, such as audio, image, video, and any other kind of multimedia file, in the same column so you can build a common metadata index on all the different types of multimedia files. Using this index, you can search across all the different types of files. Note that you cannot use this same search technique if the different types of data are stored in different types of objects, in different columns of relational tables.
interMedia can automatically extract metadata from a variety of popular audio, image, and video data formats. interMedia can also extract application attributes and store them in the comments field of the object, in XML form. Supported attributes depend on processing power for any user-defined formats. See Appendix A of Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference for a list of supported data formats from which interMedia can extract and store attributes and other features. interMedia is extensible and can be made to recognize and support additional formats.
This section contains information about digitized image concepts and using interMedia image services to build image applications or specialized interMedia image objects.
interMedia image services integrate the storage, retrieval, and management of digitized images in Oracle databases using Oracle9i.
interMedia image services support two-dimensional, static, digitized raster images stored as binary representations of real-world objects or scenes. Images may be produced by a document or photograph scanner, a video source such as a camera or VCR connected to a video digitizer or frame grabber, other specialized image capture devices, or even by program algorithms. Capture devices take an analog or continuous signal such as the light that falls onto the film in a camera, and convert it into digital values on a two-dimensional grid of data points known as pixels. Devices involved in the capture and display of images are under application control.
Digitized images consist of the image data (digitized bits) and attributes that describe and characterize the image data. Image applications sometimes associate application-specific information, such as including the name of the person pictured in a photograph, description of the image, date photographed, photographer, and so forth, with image data by storing this descriptive text in an attribute or column in the database table.
The image data (pixels) can have varying depths (bits per pixel) depending on how the image was captured, and can be organized in various ways. The organization of the image data is known as the data format.
interMedia image services can store or retrieve image data of any data format. interMedia image services can process and automatically extract properties of images of a variety of popular formats. See Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference for a list of supported data formats for which interMedia image services can process and extract metadata. In addition, certain foreign images (formats not natively understood by interMedia image services) have limited support for image processing.
The storage space required for digitized images can be large compared to traditional attribute data such as numbers and text. Many compression schemes are available to squeeze an image into fewer bytes, thus reducing storage device and network load. Lossless compression schemes squeeze an image so that when it is decompressed, the resulting image is bit-for-bit identical with the original. Lossy compression schemes do not result in an identical image when decompressed, but rather, one in which the changes may be imperceptible to the human eye.
Image interchange format describes a well-defined organization and use of image attributes, data, and often compression schemes, allowing different applications to create, exchange, and use images. Interchange formats are often stored in or as disk files. They may also be exchanged in a sequential fashion over a network and be referred to as a protocol. There are many application subdomains within the digitized imaging world and many applications that create or use digitized images within these. interMedia image services support storage and retrieval of all formats, as well as processing and attribute extraction of many of those formats.
Inexpensive image-capture and storage technologies have allowed massive collections of digital images to be created. However, as a database grows, the difficulty of finding relevant images increases. Two general approaches to this problem have been developed, both of which use metadata for image retrieval:
With interMedia image services, you can combine both approaches in designing a table to accommodate images: use traditional text columns to describe the semantic significance of the image (for example, that the pictured automobile won a particular award, or that its engine has six or eight cylinders), and use the OrdImage object type for the image, to permit content-based queries based on intrinsic attributes of the image (for example, how closely its color and shape match a picture of a specific automobile).
As an alternative to defining image-related attributes in columns separate from the image, a database designer could create a specialized composite data type that combines interMedia image services and the appropriate text, numeric, and date attributes.
The primary benefit of using content-based retrieval is reduced time and effort required to obtain image-based information. With frequent adding and updating of images in massive databases, it is often not practical to require manual entry of all attributes that might be needed for queries, and content-based retrieval provides increased flexibility and practical value. It is also useful in providing the ability to query on attributes such as texture or shape that are difficult to represent using keywords.
Examples of database applications where content-based retrieval is useful -- where the query is semantically of the form "find objects that look like this one" -- include the following:
For example, a Web-based interface to a retail clothing catalog might allow users to search by traditional categories (such as style or price range) and also by image properties (such as color or texture). Thus, a user might ask for formal shirts in a particular price range that are off-white with pin stripes. Similarly, fashion designers could use a database with images of fabric swatches, designs, concept sketches, and finished garments to facilitate their creative processes.
A content-based retrieval system processes the information contained in image data and creates an abstraction of its content in terms of visual attributes. Any query operations deal solely with this abstraction rather than with the image itself. Thus, every image inserted into the database is analyzed, and a compact representation of its content is stored in a feature vector, or signature.
The signature contains information about the following visual attributes:
Feature data for all these visual attributes is stored in the signature, whose size typically ranges from 3000 to 4000 bytes. For better performance with large image databases, you can create an index based on the signatures of your images.
Images in the database can be retrieved by matching them with a comparison image. The comparison image can be any image inside or outside the current database, a sketch, an algorithmically generated image, and so forth.
The matching process requires that a signature be generated for the comparison image. Image matching is based on comparing the signatures; a score, which is a weighted sum of the value of each attribute, is used to determine the degree of similarity when images are compared, with a smaller difference reflecting a closer match. The weights are positive real numbers whose values reflect how sensitive the matching process for a given attribute should be to the degree of similarity or dissimilarity between two images. If the weighted sum of the differences of the visual attributes is less than or equal to the threshold value, the images match; if the weighted sum is greater than the threshold, the images do not match.
Oracle interMedia Java Classes provides APIs for the OrdImageSignature object, which is used to store and compare image signature information in a Java object.
For more information on the visual attributes, weights, similarity calculation, threshold values, and indexing, see Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference.
As an extension to Java, Sun has provided the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API. JAI allows you to introduce advanced image processing operations in your Java applications. With Oracle interMedia, you can read and write images stored in the database from your JAI applications.
Oracle interMedia Java Classes provides APIs for three types of streams, which allow you to read data from BLOBs and BFILEs and write to BLOBs in your JAI applications. These stream objects are not meant to replace the input and output stream objects provided by Sun; these objects are included to provide an interface to image data stored in BLOBs and BFILEs in OrdImage objects that can be used by JAI without loss in performance.
See Chapter 7 for more information on these stream objects.
This section contains information about digitized video concepts and using interMedia video services to build video applications or specialized interMedia video objects.
interMedia video services integrate the storage, retrieval, and management of digitized video data in Oracle databases using Oracle9i.
Video may be produced by a video recorder, a video camera, digitized animation video, other specialized video recording devices, or even by program algorithms. Some video recording devices take an analog or continuous signal, such as that picked up by a video camera or video recorded on magnetic media, and convert it into digital values with specific video characteristics. Such characteristics include format, encoding type, frame rate, frame size (width and height), frame resolution, video length, compression type, number of colors, and bit rate.
Digitized video consists of the video data (digitized bits) and the attributes that describe and characterize the video data. Video applications sometimes associate application-specific information, such as the description of the video training tape, date recorded, instructor's name, producer's name, and so forth, with video data by storing descriptive text in an attribute or column in the database table.
The video data can have different formats, compression types, frame rates, frame sizes, frame resolutions, playing times, compression types, numbers of colors, and bit rates, depending upon how the video data was digitally recorded. interMedia video services can store and retrieve video data of any data format, and automatically extract metadata from video data of a variety of popular video formats. interMedia video services can also extract application attributes and store them in the comments field of the object, in XML form. Supported video attributes depend upon available hardware capabilities or processing power for any user-defined formats. See Oracle interMedia User's Guide and Reference for a list of supported data formats from which interMedia video services can extract and store attributes and other video features.
interMedia video services are extensible and can support additional video formats.
The size of digitized video (number of bytes) tends to be large compared to traditional computer objects, such as numbers and text. Therefore, several encoding schemes are used that squeeze video data into fewer bytes, thus putting a smaller load on storage devices and networks.
Oracle interMedia lets you store your multimedia information in a database table, retrieve it from the table, and manipulate it. interMedia Java Classes lets you write your own Java applications to use, manipulate, and modify multimedia data stored in an Oracle database.
interMedia Java Classes lets an application retrieve an object from a result set and manipulate the contents of the object.
Perform the following operations to write an application that will access interMedia objects in an Oracle database table:
Call a getConnection( ) method to obtain an OracleConnection object. See Example 2-3 for an example of a method that makes a connection to the database.
See Example 2-3 for an example of a method that disables auto-commit mode.
Create an OracleStatement or OraclePreparedStatement object in your application. Call the executeQuery( ) method to execute the SELECT... FOR UPDATE statement and return an OracleResultSet object, and fetch a row from the result set. See steps 1 and 2 of Example 2-4.
See Example 2-6.
Call the getCustomDatum( ) method to retrieve the interMedia object from the result set as an instance of one of the interMedia Java classes. See step 5 of Example 2-4.
Having retrieved the interMedia Java object from the result set, your application can now load new data into the object, or your application can retrieve or manipulate existing data in the object. See step 6 of Example 2-4 for an example of how to load new data into an object.
If the application modified the object in the previous step, create an OraclePreparedStatement object that contains a SQL statement that updates the database object, and execute the statement. See step 9 of Example 2-4.
Commit the transaction by calling the commit( ) method. See step 4 of Example 2-2.
See step 5 of Example 2-2.
For more information on using JDBC, see Oracle9i JDBC Developer's Guide and Reference.
Oracle Corporation may improve the interMedia object types by adding new object attributes in a future release of interMedia. Client-side applications that want to maintain compatibility with the 9.0.1 release of the interMedia object types (OrdAudio, OrdDoc, OrdImage, and OrdVideo), even after a server upgrade that changes the object types, should make a call to the compatibility initialization function at the beginning of the application.
Client-side applications written in Java using interMedia Java Classes should call the OrdMediaUtil.imCompatibilityInit( ) function after connecting to the Oracle database.
public static void imCompatibilityInit(OracleConnection con) throws Exception
This Java function takes an OracleConnection as an argument. The interMedia 9.0.1 Java API will ensure compatibility of your Oracle9i Java application with any future release of interMedia, regardless of enhanced object types.
See step 2 of Example 2-2 for an example of the imCompatibilityInit( ) method.
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