Towards quantum logic based multimedia retrieval

Searching in a huge collection of multimedia objects is a very complex task comprising different search paradigms such as classical retrieval search, database querying, and search with proximity conditions as well as a way to assign weights to different conditions. Thus, we need a sound formalism unifying underlying search concepts. The framework of fuzzy logic is often seen as such a unifying framework. Our work identifies some problems with fuzzy logic for multimedia retrieval, namely the dominance problem and the problem of violated logical laws such as idempotence and associativity especially when weighting is involved. Our approach is to apply a mathematical framework inspired by the theory of quantum mechanics and logic. We show that our quantum logic based query language overcomes problems of fuzzy logic in our context. This is due to the fact that we regard more semantics of a query and its involved conditions in comparison to fuzzy logic. A fuzzy t-norm, for example, deals with membership values whereas the conjunction in our framework is performed on subqueries.