- Written By: C.B. Fox
- Edited By: Jenn Walker
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Copyright Protected:
2003-2012 Conjecture Corporation
Multimedia data mining refers to the analysis of large amounts of multimedia information in order to find patterns or statistical relationships. Once data is collected, computer programs are used to analyze it and look for meaningful connections. This information is often used by governments to improve social systems. It can also be used in marketing to discover consumer habits.
Multimedia data mining requires the collection of huge amounts of data. The sample size is important when analyzing data because predicted trends and patterns are more likely to be inaccurate with a smaller sample. This data can be collected from a number of different media, including videos, sound files, and images. Some experts also consider spatial data and text to be multimedia. Information from one or more of these media is the focus of data collection.
Whereas an analysis of numerical data can be straightforward, multimedia data analysis requires sophisticated computer programs which can turn it into useful numerical data. There are a number of computer programs available that make sense of the information gathered from multimedia data mining. These computer programs are used to search for relationships that may not be apparent or logically obvious.
When multimedia is mined for information, one of the most common uses for this information is to anticipate behavior patterns or trends. Information can be divided into classes as well, which allows different groups, such as men and women or Sundays and Mondays, to be analyzed separately. Data can be clustered, or grouped by logical relationship, which can help track consumer affinity for a certain brand over another, for example.
Multimedia data mining has a number of uses in today’s society. An example of this would be the use of traffic camera footage to analyze traffic flow. This information can be used when planning new streets, expanding existing streets, or diverting traffic. Government organizations and city planners can use the information to help traffic flow more smoothly and quickly.
While the term data mining is relatively new, the practice of mining data has been around for a long time. Grocery stores, for example, have long used data mining to track consumer behavior by collecting data from their registers. The numerical data relating to sales information can be used by a computer program to learn what people are buying and when they are likely to buy certain products. This information is often used to determine where to place certain products and when to put certain products on sale.
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Discuss this Article
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Mammmood
Post 4 |
@MrMoody - I used to do some website optimization and I think I have a clue as to how the programs could work with video files.
These days, a lot of video files posted on websites have tags attached to them. The tags contain the keywords which tell you what the video is about.
Obviously this is not as descriptive a piece of information as watching the whole video itself, but it does tell you something; I’ve often had to add tags to videos when adding them to websites, so that the videos would show up in search engine result pages. |
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MrMoody
Post 3 |
@SkyWhisperer - I like the example that the article gives of visual traffic patterns that are captured by cameras near a traffic light or someplace like that.
I am sure that satellite imagery can be used in such analysis, when it gets down to the level of detail where it shows where people are traveling.
I don’t know how such computer algorithms would work however. I work in the software industry and admit that any program that can parse an image and provide “trends” is a sophisticated product indeed. Text data is much easier to work with and can be sucked into a lot of different applications. |
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SkyWhisperer
Post 2 |
@NathanG - I would say yes it would, but not for the reasons you described.
I think the strictest definition of multimedia data mining involves looking at videos and images themselves to see patterns. You don’t have to do that with YouTube or other file sharing sites.
All you need to do is look at the number of hits a web page receives. You don’t have to parse the video, itself, so to speak.
However, the article says that text can fall into the category of multimedia data mining, so I guess you could argue that the links to the YouTube videos would be part of the data mining operation. Frankly, I think that multimedia data mining is a very broad term that can encompass a lot of things.
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NathanG
Post 1 |
I wonder if multimedia data mining also involves tracking what videos people are watching on YouTube or on some of the other video sharing sites.
So many people are watching and uploading videos these days that I think this has become a better barometer of what people are doing online than what websites they visit.
For that matter, tracking the songs that people download could be another metric, too, that marketers use to figure what to sell to the general public. |
