Research in the area of
content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is often hindered by the lack of common
standards for CBIR systems. Frequently researchers find that they have to write
code for an entire CBIR system - feature extraction, indexing and database
system, query engine, user interface and communication protocols - even though
they may only be interested in one aspect of CBIR from a research point of
view. Not only does this slow research, it almost invariably results in tightly
coupled systems with no reusable components. The GNU Image-Finding Tool (GIFT, http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/gift.html)
is an open framework for content-based image retrieval that addresses this
problem, with the aim of promoting code reuse among researchers and application
developers.
The GIFT explicitly allows
for the addition of new query paradigms to the framework. It uses MRML (the
Multimedia Retrieval Markup Language) as its
communication protocol for client-server communication. MRML is XML-based and
is documented at http://www.mrml.net. The
use of MRML decouples the interface from the query engine, allowing researchers
to use freely available interfaces if that is not their area of interest. The converse is also true. An additional
benefit of the use of MRML is that it permits the development of a common
benchmarking harness for MRML-compliant CBIR systems. This is being put into
practice at the Benchathlon CBIR contests (http://www.benchathlon.net/).
Dr David Squire is a senior
lecturer in the Clayton School of Information Technology. Prior to joining the
Faculty of Information Technology at Monash in 2000, he was a Research Fellow
in the Computer Vision Group at the