A content-based parallel image retrieval system

As we all know, the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is very time-consuming due to the extraction and matching of high dimensional and complex features. The traditional CBIR systems could not respond to a very large number of retrieval requests at mean time, which are submitted from the Internet. In this paper, we propose a content-based parallel image retrieval system to achieve high responding ability. Our system is developed on cluster architectures. It has several retrieval servers to supply the service of content-based image retrieval. Our system adopts the Browser/Server (B/S) mode. The users could visit our system though web pages. Our system uses the Symmetrical Color-Spatial Features (SCSF) to represent the content of an image. The SCSF is effective and efficient for image matching because it is independent of image distortion such as rotation and flip as well as it increases the matching accuracy. The SCSF was organized by M-tree, which could speedup the searching procedure. Our experiments show that the image matching is quickly and efficiently with the use of SCSF. And with the support of several retrieval servers, the system could respond to many users at mean time.