Photo retrieval based on spatial layout with hardware acceleration

A new photo retrieval system for mobile devices is proposed in this paper. The system can be used to search for photos with similar spatial layout effectively and efficiently, and it adopts a new algorithm that extracts features of image regions based on hardware K-Means clustering. Since K-Means is computationally intensive for real-time applications in embedded systems, it is necessary to accelerate K-Means using parallel architecture to meet the real-time requirement of the retrieval process. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm in the photo retrieval system obtains better mean average precision than other methods, and the K-Means hardware provides a tradeoff between the execution time and the retrieval performance on the software and hardware co-simulation platform with an FPGA.