Nowadays, the similarity search in multimedia databases is performed through similarity queries explicitly specified by users. The queries return a certain part of the database that is relevant to the user specified query parameters. However, this approach suffers in case the user does not know how to specify the query, or actually she/he only wants to know what the database contains in the whole picture. In such case non-standard access to data is more appropriate, e.g., the exploration of a multimedia database.
During the exploration process the user gains a complex idea of all the stored data rather than a particular part of database returned as the result of some similarity query. In the complex view the user is osupported in browsing the space of multimedia data (typically by multi-touch device, provided by modern technologies, e.g., iPad) and that results in stream of similarity queries. For a convenient user-friendly browsing, the exploration system has to evaluate these queries promptly, which is not guaranteed in case of standard query processing (even approximate). Hence, the goal of this project is to propose and implement access methods that provide functionality of real-time similarity retrieval, thus founding fundamentals for user-friendly exploration of multimedia databases.