SemanticMetadata.net » Software

Searching with Lire in big datasets

Mathias Lux — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:17:34 +0000

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

Mathias Lux — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:37:23 +0000

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

Mathias Lux — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:41:46 +0000

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.

Lire 0.8 released

Mathias Lux — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:15:33 +0000

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

ZoRa Photo Director

Mathias Lux — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:46:26 +0000

Just got word from Berthold Daum that he has integrated LIRe in the ZoRa Photo Director. That’s desktop asset management application, written in Java which allows for management of large photo collections. Source and binaries (Win & Linux) are available at http://www.photozora.org. Not to forget: it’s built on Eclipse!

Links

http://www.photozora.org

Finding duplicate code …

Mathias Lux — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:58:05 +0000

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and – of course – who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html