Efficient resource selection in distributed visual information systems

With the advances in multimedia databases and the popularization of the Internet, it is now possible to access large image and video repositories distributed throughout the world. One of the challenging problems in such an access is how the information in the respective databases can be summarized to enable an intelligent selection of relevant database sites based on visual queries. This paper presents an approach to this problem that is based on image content-based indexing of a metadatabase at a query distribution server. The metadatabase records a summary of the visual content of the images per database through image templates and statistical features characterizing the similarity value distributions of images. The selection of databases is done by searching the metadatabase using a histogram-based ranking algorithm that uses query similarity to a template and the features of databases associated with the template. The database selection mechanism has been implemented as a metaserver and extensive experiments have been done to demonstrate the effectiveness of the database ranking algorithm.