Patent Document ID: 20030101164
Application ID: 10270250
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1 / A method of comparing first and second composite multimedia documents, each comprising at least two individual media selected from categories comprising images, sounds, video signals, animated vector graphics, and texts, the method being characterized in that it comprises the following steps: a) allocating a meta-identifier to each of the first and second composite multimedia documents, which meta-identifier is in the form of a weighted hypergraph of nodes and relationships between said nodes and includes meta-segments unambiguously identifying individual media making up the multimedia document concerned; b) performing recursion over secondary trees of intra-medium relationships of the individual media of each of the first and second composite multimedia documents; c) for the hypergraph of each individual medium of the first multimedia document, performing an operation of maximizing matching with the hypergraph of an individual medium of the second multimedia document; d) for the hypergraph of each individual medium of the first multimedia document, determining the costs of editing operations leading to maximum or quasi-maximum matching with a hypergraph of an individual medium of the second multimedia document, and expressing distances between the individual media as a function of said costs; e) performing recursion over the main tree for producing inter-media relationships between the individual media of each of the first and second composite multimedia documents; f) for the hypergraph of all of the individual media of the first multimedia document, performing an operation of maximizing matching with the hypergraph for all of the individual media of the second multimedia document; and g) for the hypergraph of all of the individual media of the first multimedia document, determining the costs of the edit operation that produces maximum or quasi-maximum matching with a hypergraph of all of the individual media of the second multimedia document, and expressing the distance between the first and second composite multimedia documents as a function of said cost.