Distributed Image Search

摘要

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for distributed nearest-neighbor search for image retrieval are disclosed. An example distributed image retrieval system includes a root server and a plurality of leaf servers. The root server controls the clustering of images in the image corpus, and determines the assignment of image clusters to a collection of leaf servers. Each leaf server is independently configured to perform a two-stage nearest-neighbor search in a locality-sensitive hash space for a received query image within the leaf server's assigned images clusters. Thus, the distributed image retrieval system is modular and amendable to tuning, modifications, duplication, and replacement on a per-server basis. In addition, the design of the image retrieval system allows flexible load balancing among the leaf servers.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
receiving a query image; generating a representation of the query image; identifying multiple image clusters that correspond to the query image; identifying multiple image search servers that correspond to the multiple image clusters that correspond to the query image; sending the representation of the query image to each of the multiple image search servers that correspond to the multiple image clusters that correspond to the query image; receiving, from each of the multiple image search servers that correspond to the multiple image clusters that correspond to the query image, data representing one or more result images; ranking the result images that are received from the multiple image search servers that correspond to the multiple image clusters that correspond to the query image; and providing the ranked result images in response to the query image.