CrossMedia: Supporting Collaborative Research of Media Retrieval

The goal of our new e-science platform is to support collaborative research communities by providing a simple solution to jointly develop semantic- and media search algorithms on common and challenging datasets processed by novel feature extractors. Querying of nearest neighbor (NN) elements on large data collections is an important task for several information or content retrieval tasks. In the paper a flexible framework for research purposes is introduced for testing features, metrics, distances and indexing structures. The core part of the content based retrieval system is the LHI-tree, a disk-based index scheme for fast retrieval of multimodal features. Additionally, we compare LHI-tree to FLANN, an effective implementation of ANN search and show that LHI-tree gives similar list of retrieved images.