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Abstract

As the number of digital images is growing fast and Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is gaining in popularity, CBIR systems should leap towards Web-scale datasets. In this paper, we report on our experience in building an experimental similarity search system on a test collection of more than 50 million images. The first big challenge we have been facing was obtaining a collection of images of this scale with the corresponding descriptive features. We have tackled the non-trivial process of image crawling and extraction of several MPEG-7 descriptors. The result of this effort is a test collection, the first of such scale, opened to the research community for experiments and comparisons. The second challenge was to develop indexing and searching mechanisms able to scale to the target size and to answer similarity queries in real-time. We have achieved this goal by creating sophisticated centralized and distributed structures based purely on the metric space model of data. We have joined them together which has resulted in an extremely flexible and scalable solution. In this paper, we study in detail the performance of this technology and its evolvement as the data volume grows by three orders of magnitude. The results of the experiments are very encouraging and promising for future applications.

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Notes

  1. http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/

  2. EU IST FP6 project 045128: Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer IR

  3. http://www.flickr.com/

  4. http://www.exalead.com/

  5. http://www.picsearch.com/

  6. http://www.espgame.org/

  7. http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

  8. http://www.flickr.com/map/

  9. http://www.tiltomo.com/

  10. http://media-vibrance.itn.liu.se/vinnova/cse.php

  11. http://labs.ideeinc.com/

  12. http://www.alipr.com/

  13. http://www.ist-chorus.org/

  14. http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

  15. http://www.diligentproject.org/

  16. http://cophir.isti.cnr.it/

  17. http://meta.cesnet.cz

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the EU IST FP6 project 045128 (SAPIR) and national projects GACR 201/08/P507, GACR 201/09/0683, GACR 102/09/H042, and MSMT 1M0545. Hardware infrastructure was provided by MetaCenterFootnote 17 and by IBM SUR Award.

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Correspondence to Jan Sedmidubsky.

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Batko, M., Falchi, F., Lucchese, C. et al. Building a web-scale image similarity search system. Multimed Tools Appl 47, 599–629 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0339-z

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