ISO/IEC 13249-5:2003

Overview

ISO/IEC 13249-5:2003 specifies the Still Image part of the SQL multimedia and application packages (SQL/MM) for relational databases. It defines notations, conventions, concepts and still image user-defined types (UDTs) and associated routines for storing, managing, manipulating and retrieving still images within SQL database environments. The standard focuses on image characteristics (height, width, format), image features (average color, color histogram, positional color, texture), image manipulation (rotation, scaling, thumbnailing) and similarity assessment for content-based queries.

Key topics and technical requirements

• Definition of generic still image UDTs and methods/routines to operate on them (e.g., set content, change format, scale, rotate, create thumbnails).
• Image feature types and algorithms for feature extraction and scoring:
  • SI_AverageColor
  • SI_ColorHistogram
  • SI_PositionalColor
  • SI_Texture
  • SI_FeatureList
• Complementary SQL-invoked functions and observer methods for feature initialization, clearing and scoring.
• Still Image Information Schema and Definition Schema (views and base tables) to expose supported features, formats, conversions, thumbnails and status codes.
• Conformance requirements and mapping to related SQL/MM functionality (references to ISO/IEC 9075-9).
• Support for common image formats as referenced (e.g., JPEG, JPEG 2000) while noting that not all features apply to every format.

Practical applications

• Enable content-based image retrieval (CBIR) within SQL databases by allowing similarity queries using extracted features (color, texture, positional color).
• Integrate image handling into digital asset management, multimedia catalogs, and web services where images are first-class SQL-managed objects.
• Support scientific, medical and research databases for image annotation, retrieval and analysis within existing DBMS infrastructures.
• Facilitate decision support, data mining and data warehousing scenarios that combine image-derived features with structured data for analytics.

Who should use this standard

• DBMS vendors and implementers adding SQL/MM Still Image capabilities.
• Application developers building image-aware database applications (multimedia search, DAM, PACS for medical imaging).
• System architects for information/content management systems requiring standardized image types and SQL integration.
• Researchers and integrators needing consistent schemas and conformance guidance for image features and similarity scoring.

Related standards

• ISO/IEC 13249 (SQL multimedia and applications) - other parts
• ISO/IEC 9075-9 (SQL/MM) - SQL multimedia language bindings
• ISO/IEC 10918-1 (JPEG) and ISO/IEC 15444-1 (JPEG 2000) - referenced image formats

Keywords: ISO/IEC 13249-5, SQL multimedia, SQL/MM still image, still image user-defined types, content-based image retrieval, image features, color histogram, texture, database image management.