SemanticMetadata.net

Lire

An Open Source Java Content Based Image Retrieval Library

The LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval) library provides a simple way to retrieve images and photos based on their color and texture characteristics. LIRE creates a Lucene index of image features for content based image retrieval (CBIR). Three of the available image features are taken from the MPEG-7 Standard: ScalableColor, ColorLayout and EdgeHistogram a fourth one, the Auto Color Correlogram has been implemented based on recent research results. Many others have been contributed, check out the demo application. Furthermore simple methods for searching the index and result browsing are provided by LIRE. The LIRE library and the LIRE Demo application as well as all the source are available under the Gnu GPL license.

Documentation and help are available

• on the developers wiki
• on the developers mailing list

Please drop me a line if you use LIRE in your project. I would appreciate feedback very much and I will link reference projects.

Email:

If you like this work and you want to support the development of Lire, consider to donate to the project.

Consulting & Services

You plan to work with LIRE and you are stuck? I offer additional consulting services for LIRE, visual information retrieval and multimedia management. Note that the software is free, but I can help you with questions like:

• Which ones are the right features for me?
• How do I implement a service like XXX?
• What is it LIRE can / cannot do for me?
• How to integrate more intelligent processing methods like LSA or PCA?
• What are the technical implications and limits when using LIRE?
• … and many more.

Please contact me for further information.

About the citation of Lire

We kindly ask you to refer the following paper in any publication mentioning Lire:

Lux Mathias, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis. Lire: Lucene Image Retrieval – An Extensible Java CBIR Library. In proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 1085-1088, Vancouver, Canada, 2008

• Download paper here (or visit the ACM page)
• Download BibTeX

Downloads

• Lire 0.9 downloads
• LireDemo 0.9 (GUI application to try out)
• Lire nightly build - a fresh build each day from the SVN

Demos

• Application screen cast on YouTube or Google Video
• Flash based demo for mosaic creation with Lire Demo

Documentation

• Go to the online API docs
• Go to the Lire DokuWiki page

Lire Demo

Included with the release the LIRE Demo found its way into the LIRE package. It provides a simple GUI interface for

• Indexing photos
• Searching photos
• Browsing the created index
• Creating mosaic images based on indexed images (thanks to Lukas Esterle & Manuel Warum for contributed the mosaic-ing code.)

The mosaic creation is described in detail in this post. You can also find a flash based demo of the mosaic creation abilities of Lire.
Visit sourceforge.net to download LireDemo. Note that Java 1.6 is needed for using LIRE Demo.Installation instructions:

• Download LIRE Demo from sf.net: download
• Unzip (or untar) the downloaded files.
• Ensure that you haveJava 1.6 installed.
• Start the demo with “java -jar LireDemo.jar” (or with a double click if you are using Windows)

Online Demo: Barrique

A friend of mine – Roman Kern – put up his all fresh and newly created personal information portal CorvusAlbus featuring Web 2.0 client side data encryption, photo and text blogs, excessive use of style sheets and javascript and … Tada: Similarity search for images. He included LIRE to allow users to search for similar photos.

When you browse through the photos you will find a small find similar link on the upper right corner of the browser window. Using this link you will get all images visually similar to the current one (like shown in the screenshot). One more hint for visiting CorvusAlbus: Don’t go there with MS Internet Explorer, it won’t help you much! Only Firefox, Opera and Konqueror are supported.

All sources etc. as well as documentation on the project are available at http://barrique.corvusalbus.com/.

ZoRa Photo Director

The ZoRa Photo Director is an asset management tool and is available for Windows and Linux. It is managed by Berthold Daum and uses Lire for duplicate detection and similarity search. Sources and binaries are available at http://www.photozora.org/.