In the video database, each video contains temporal and spatial relationships between content objects. The temporal relationships can be specified between frame sequences and the spatial relationships can be specified by the relationships between objects in a single frame. Moreover, the information related to locations and motions of objects is included in video database. Many video indexing strategies have been proposed, which include the above information to speed up the query processing time. For example, the 3D C-string strategy, it uses the projections of objects to represent spatial and temporal relations between objects in a video. Moreover, the 3D C-string strategy can keep track of the motions and size changes of the objects in a video. However, there are three problems caused by the 3D C-string strategy. The first one is that it cannot index some kinds of videos in which an object appears and then disappears for more than one time. The second one is that the representation of the 3D C-string is too complex for deriving spatial relationships. The last one is that the 3D C-string cannot derive the absolute locations of objects, since it records the relative locations of objects. In this thesis, in order to solve the problems of the 3D C-string strategy, we propose three new spatial relationships. By making use of the three spatial relationships, we can express the condition that objects disappear and appear. Moreover, based on the sequence of spatial relationships, we can derive the temporal relationships. Based on this technique, we propose three index processing strategies for video database. The first strategy is the Temporal UID Matrix (TUID) strategy. We use those 13 unique numbers used in the UID strategy and our 3 new added unique numbers to represent spatial relationships. Then, we store the sequence of spatial relationships in the TUID matrix. In this way, we can efficiently support query types of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal relationships. However, since the TUID strategy does not record the information of objects, it cannot support the query type by the information of objects. Therefore, we propose the second strategy, the 2D Video String strategy, to keep track of the motions, locations, and size changes associated with the video objects. Although the 2D Video String strategy can support all types of queries, it is less efficient than the TUID strategy. By making use of the advantages of both strategies, we propose another video indexing strategy, the Hybrid strategy. We record the information of objects in the diagonal part of the TUID matrix. From our simulation study, we show that our proposed strategies can provide a shorter search time for video data than Lee et al.'s 3D C-string strategy, except the 2D Video String strategy for the temporal query.

Traditional database systems only support textual and numerical data. Video data stored in these database systems can only be retrieved through their video identifiers, titles or descriptions. In the video data, frame-by-frame object change is one of the most obvious information. Each video contains temporal and spatial relationships between content objects. The temporal relationships can be specified between frame sequences and the spatial relationships can be specified by the relationships between objects in a single frame. The difficulty in designing a content-based video database system is how to store and describe the relationships between moving objects completely. Many researches on content-based video retrieval represented the content of video as a set of frames, but they either left out the temporal ordering of frames in the shot or only stored the relationships between objects in a single frame. According to these observations, we conclude that a content-based video database system requires video indexing, query processing and a convenient user interface to fit the requirements and characteristics of videos. In this thesis, we design and implement a query processing strategy for video data. In the proposed strategy, we consider three query types: the exact object match, the spatial-temporal object retrieval and the motion query, where a exact object match is to find the video files which contain the specific objects, a spatial-temporal objects retrieval is to retrieve the object pairs that satisfy some spatial-temporal relationships and a motion query is to find the set of frames which contain the object movements. Moreover, we consider three design issues: the video indexing, the video query processing and the video query interface. When there are a large number of videos in a video database and each video contains many shots, frames and objects, the processing time for content retrieval is tremendous. Thus, we need a proper video indexing strategy to speed up the searching time. In order to fulfill the spatial-temporal relationships of objects between different frames, we give the indexes both in the spatial and temporal axes. In the temporal index file structure, we propose the shot-based B+-tree to index the temporal data. In the spatial index file structure, we use R-tree to store not only the relationships between objects in one frame, but also the relationships of one object when the object first and last appears in the shot. Based on this strategy, we can describe the status of a moving object in details. For the part of query processing, we propose a signature file structure to filter out the videos that absolutely can not be the answer. After that, in order to determine whether the answer exists in the candidate videos, we use a multi-dimensional string, called binary string, to represent the spatial-temporal relationships between objects. Then, the video query processing problem will become a binary string matching problem. Finally, we design and implement an user-friendly user interface. Our system is performed on a Pentium III machine with one CPU clock rate of 550 MHz, 256 MB of main memory, running under Windows 2000 Professional edition, used Access 2000 database and coded in Delphi 6 with about 10,000 lines. From our experience, we show that the proposed system can support an efficient query processing, a fast searching capabilities and an user-friendly user interface.

The presented dissertation addresses the issue of expressing temporary relations (the present and the past) in the texts of the authors of the Baroque period. The excerpt includes 44 works of historic literary output. The topic is based on a semantic definition of temporal relationships in the Baroque language and interferes with the paratactic and hypotactic method of expression. Within the scope of paratactic connection of syntactic units, we analyze phrasal connections (the connection of main clauses and the connection of paratactic subclauses), text and phrasal connections, within the scope of hypotactic concentration mainly the relationship of the main and subordinate adverbial clauses of time. The classification according to various paratactic and subordinating conjunctions is led by the effort to obtain a comprehensive overview of the possible ways to express temporal relationships. The aim of the work is to contribute to an analytical examination of the syntactic language level of the Baroque period and to confirm the hypothesis of intact continuity of the language development between the humanistic, Baroque and National Revival periods.