Multimedia Web Search Based on a Novel Similarity Search System

Web Published:
4/18/2012
Description:

Princeton Docket # 05-2158

 

To date, there is no practical similarity search engine for general-purpose high-dimensional data and there is no index engine for similarity search.  Current search engines such as the Google search engine perform exact searches on text documents and text annotations of non-text data.

 

Researchers at Princeton University have developed a content-addressable and ¿searchable storage system for managing and exploring massive amounts of feature-rich data such as images, audio or scientific data.  Rather than using words to search the Internet for an image or audio file, this novel technology utilize multimedia files themselves as queries.  Briefly, data corresponding to an object is first segmented into several regions.  A feature vector is then generated from each region as well as the whole object, and converted into a bit vector.  This results in very compact representation of each region, and the distance between two regions can be calculated.  Query data to an object goes through the same process of segmentation, feature extraction, bit vector conversion, and embedding. Then the query object bit vector is used to do filtering in the database and obtain the top objects that are closest to the query object¿s bit vector.  An illustration of an image similarity search process is shown in Figure 1 below.

 

 

Applications        

Access, search, explore and manage noisy and high-dimensional data such as:

·        Audio

·        Video

·        Images

·        Scientific sensor data

 

Advantages         

·        First to market potential

·        Demonstrated high effectiveness

·        Metadata 3 to 72 times more compact than previous systems

·        Query process speeded up by a factor of 5 or more

 

Intellectual Property status

U.S. patent application (Patent number: 7966327) has been issued.

Patent Information:
For Information, Contact:
John Ritter
Director
Princeton University
609-258-1570
jritter@Princeton.EDU
Inventors:
Kai Li
Moses Charikar
Qin Lv
Keywords:
computers/software