MM-FOOD: a high-dimensional index structure for efficiently querying content and concept of multimedia data

The semantic query problem is commonly called the semantic gap and is one of the significant problems in multimedia data retrieval. In this study, we focus on multimedia data retrieval by combining semantic information with data content to solve the semantic gap problem effectively. The main idea behind the combination of low-level content descriptors and the concept of multimedia data is to represent the content information with the semantic information by adding a low-level content descriptor as a new dimension to the index structure. This new dimension is represented by constructing an array index structure that uses a fuzzy clustering algorithm. Thus, a new high-dimensional index structure, named MM-FOOD, supporting querying of multimedia data, including fuzzy querying, is presented in this paper. This proposed index structure’s construction and query algorithms are explained throughout this paper. Our experiments show that our indexing mechanism is considerably efficient compared to the basic indexing approach, which stores low-level content and semantic concept descriptors in separate structures when the data size is large.