A fast image-gathering system on the world-wide web using a PC cluster

Abstract

Thanks to the recent explosive progress of WWW (World- Wide Web), we can easily access a large number of images from WWW. There are, however, no established methods to make use of WWW as a large image database. In this paper, we describe an automatic image-gathering system from WWW, in which we use both keywords and image features. By exploiting some existing keyword-based search engines and selecting images by their image features, our system obtains, with high accuracy, images that are strongly related to query keywords. This system has been implemented on a parallel PC cluster, which enables us to gather more than one hundred images from WWW in about one minute.