Content-based indexing of earth-observing satellite image database with fuzzy attributes

The retrieval of images through the use of content-based search techniques often requires inferencing and reasoning. As a result the processing of content-based queries in large databases is frequently reduced to membership and range queries on data having vague or uncertain attributes. We refer to these as fuzzy attributes. In this paper, a hierarchical indexing technique for membership and range queries in databases containing data having fuzzy attributes is proposed. This approach is suitable for both unimodal and multimodal fuzzy membership functions. In the proposed approach, an index using a multi-attribute indexing scheme such as a hierarchical hash table is generated based on the discrete representation of each fuzzy attribute. Indexing is then performed by traversing the data structure looking for the activation values provided by the query.