A Scalable Approach for Content-Based Image Retrieval in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-peer networking offers a scalable solution for sharing multimedia data across the network. With a large amount of visual data distributed among different nodes, it is an important but challenging issue to perform content-based retrieval in peer-to-peer networks. While most of the existing methods focus on indexing high dimensional visual features and have limitations of scalability, in this paper we propose a scalable approach for content-based image retrieval in peer-to-peer networks by employing the bag-of-visual-words model. Compared with centralized environments, the key challenge is to efficiently obtain a global codebook, as images are distributed across the whole peer-to-peer network. In addition, a peer-to-peer network often evolves dynamically, which makes a static codebook less effective for retrieval tasks. Therefore, we propose a dynamic codebook updating method by optimizing the mutual information between the resultant codebook and relevance information, and the workload balance among nodes that manage different codewords. In order to further improve retrieval performance and reduce network cost, indexing pruning techniques are developed. Our comprehensive experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is scalable in evolving and distributed peer-to-peer networks, while achieving improved retrieval accuracy.