Web-scale System for Image Similarity Search: When the Dreams Are Coming True

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This publication doesn't include Faculty of Economics and Administration. It includes Faculty of Informatics. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

NOVÁK David BATKO Michal ZEZULA Pavel

Year of publication 2008
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI 2008)
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Web http://index.ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4558154/4564912/04564981.pdf
Field Informatics
Keywords similarity search; content-based search; image search; large-scale search; distributed data structures
Description Digital images have become a commodity which is searched on the Web as ordinarily as web pages. However, current large-scale engines search the images only on the basis of their annotations, while the content-based similarity systems do not seem to be ready for such scales. In this paper, we open the way to Web-scale image similarity search. We present a flexible system based on the metric space model and on the peer-to-peer paradigm. It uses M-Chord and M-Tree structures as its fundamental components and measures the image similarity by a combination of five MPEG-7 features. The system has been implemented including a graphical interface for online demonstrations and it currently indexes 10 million images crawled from the Web. We propose a novel strategy for approximate evaluation of similarity queries and we test its performance by a series of experiments. The results show that the system provides high-quality answers with response times around 0.5 second.
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