Tag Archives: Development

Docker Image for LireSolr

Docker MobyWe all know that setting up a server application is a huge pain in the ass, but there’s hope: Docker is an open source project for packaging those things and making them runnable within containers. Only thing one needs to do is to create an image, which then can be used to create a container.

LireSolr now provides such a Docker image on Docker Hub. Basically you can install Docker, then use the docker command in the shell (Linux) or the PowerShell (MS Windows) to automatically download and run a container based on the image with a single command:

$> docker run -p 8983:8983 dermotte/liresolr:latest

What you need to do then is to index some images and take a look at the sample application. A detailed step-by-step howto is provided in the documentation.

Links

  • Documentation in the LireSolr Docker image
  • LireSolr at Docker Hub

Large image data sets with LIRE - some new numbers

People lately asked whether LIRE can do more than linear search and I always answered: Yes, it should … but you know I never tried. But: Finally I came around to index the MIR-FLICKR data set and some of my Flickr-crawled photos and ended up with an index of 1,443,613 images. I used CEDD as main feature and a hashing algorithm to put multiple hashes per images into Lucene — to be interpreted as words. By tuning similarity, employing a Boolean query, and adding a re-rank step I ended up with a pretty decent approximate retrieval scheme, which is much faster and does not loose too many images on the way, which means the method has an acceptable recall. The image below shows the numbers along with a sample query. Linear search took more than a minute, while the hashing based approach did (nearly) the same thing in less than a second. Note that this is just a sequential, straight forward approach, so no optimization has been done to the performance. Also the hashing approach has not yet been investigated in detail, i.e. there are some parameters that still need some tuning … but let’s say it’s a step into the right direction.

Results-CEDD-Hashing

Face Detection - convenience command line utility for Windows

Again 🙂 Sometimes there is no time to compile OpenCV right here right now. Therefore I compiled a small win32 command line utility for this excact task. Just give a photo with some faces as the first parameter and you’ll get the faces centers, width and height on stdout.

Links

Searching with Lire in big datasets

Having received several complaints about the slowness of Lire when searching in 100k+ documents I took my time to write a small how to to explain approaches for search in big (relatively) data sets.

Lire has the ability to create indexes with lots of different features (descriptors, like RGB color histograms or CEDD). While this opens the opportunity to flexibility at search time as we can select the feature at the time we create a query, the index tends to get bigger and bigger and searcher take longer and longer.

With a data set of 121,379 images the index created with the features selected for default in Lire Demo has a size of 14,3 GB on the disk. In contrast to that an index just storing the CEDD feature along with the image identifier has a size of 29 MB.

Due to the size of the index also linear search tends to get slower. While for the index stripped down to the CEDD feature and the identifier searching takes (on a AMD Quad-Core computer with 4GB RAM and Java 1.7) roughly 0.33 seconds, searching the big index takes 7 minutes and 3 seconds.

So if you want to index and search big data sets (> 100.000 images for instance) I recommend to

  • select which features you need,
  • create the index with a minimum set of features, and
  • eventually split the index per feature and select the index on the fly instead of the feature
  • also you can load the index into RAM

For more on loading the index to RAM and the option to use local features read on in the developer wiki.

Lire and Lire Demo v 0.9 released

I just released Lire and Lire Demo in version 0.9 on sourceforge.net. Basically it’s the alpha version with additional speed and stability enhancements for bag of visual words (BoVW) indexing. While this has already been possible in earlier versions I re-furbished vocabulary creation (k-means clustering) and indexing to support up to 4 CPU cores. I also integrated a function to add documents to BoVW indexes incrementally. So a list of major changes since Lire 0.8 includes

  • Major speed-up due to change and re-write of indexing strategies for local features
  • Auto color correlation and color histogram features improved
  • Re-ranking filter based on global features and LSA
  • Parallel bag of visual words indexing and search supporting SURF and SIFT including incremental index updates (see also in the wiki)
  • Added functionality to Lire Demo including support for new Lire features and a new result list view

Download and try:

  • Source and binaries (or as tar.bz2)
  • Lire Demo

Lire Demo 0.9 alpha 2 just released

Finally I found some time to go through Lire and fix several of the — for me — most annoying bugs. While this is still work in progress I have a preview with the demo uploaded to sf.net. New features are:

  • Auto Color Correlogram and Color Histogram features improved
  • Re-ranking based on different features supported
  • Enhanced results view
  • Much faster indexing (parallel, use -server switch for your JVM)
  • Much faster search (re-write of the searhc code in Lire)
  • New developer menu for faster switching of search features
  • Re-ranking of results based on latent semantic analysis

You can find the updated Lire Demo along with a windows launcher here, Mac and Linux users please run it using “java -jar … ” or double click (if your windows manager supports actions like that 🙂

  • Download Liredemo v0.9 alpha 2

The source is — of course — GPL and available in the SVN.

Visual Attention in Lire

While doing my preparations for my multimedia information systems lecture I finally came around to implement the visual attention model of Stentiford myself. I just check in the sources (SVN). The algorithm gives actually really nice results compared to its actual simplicity (implementationwise). You can see an example in the following figure. On the left hand side there is the original image and on the right hand side a visualization of the attention map. The light areas (especially the white ones) are deemed centers of attention. Sky and sand are so to say just random noise (there is a lot of “random” in this approach).

Links

LIRe development mailing list

Few weeks ago I was asked if there is a mailing list dedicated to LIRe and development of applications with LIRe. That was reason enough for moe to create one. The mailing list is available at Google Groups and it’s called lire-dev. Please feel free to subscribe and ask (and of course answer and discuss) any questions regarding LIRe.

Links

  • LIRe Dev Google Group

Lire 0.8 released

I just released LIRe v0.8. LIRe - Lucene Image Retrieval - is a Java library for easy content based image retrieval. Based on Lucene it doesn’t need a database and works reliable and rather fast. Major change in this version is the support of Lucene 3.0.1, which has a changed API and better performance on some OS. A critical bug was fixed in the Tamura feature implementation. It now definitely performs better 🙂 Hidden in the depths of the code there is an implementation of the approximate fast indexing approach of G. Amato. It copes with the problem of linear search and provides a method for fast approximate retrieval for huge repositories (millions?). Unfortunately I haven’t tested with millions, just with tens thousands, which proves that it works, but it doesn’t show how fast.

Links

  • Download Lire & Lire Demo