Current methods of searching audiovisual content can be a hit-and-miss affair. Manually tagging online media content is time consuming, and costly. But new ‘query by example’ methods, built on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, could provide the way forward for such data-intensive content searches, say European researchers.
A team of researchers have turned to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, in which data is distributed and shared directly between computers, to power potent yet data intensive audiovisual search technology. The technique, known as query by example, uses content, rather than text, to search for similar content, providing more accurate search results and reducing or even eliminating the need for pictures, videos and audio recordings to be laboriously annotated manually. However, effectively implementing content-based search on a large scale requires a fundamentally different approach to the text-based search technology running on the centralised systems of the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
“Because we’re dealing with images, video and audio, content-based search is very data intensive. Comparing two images is not a problem, but comparing hundreds of thousands of images is not practical using a centralised system,” says Yosi Mass, an expert on audiovisual search technology at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel. “A P2P architecture offers a scalable solution by distributing the data across different peers in a network and ensuring there is no central point of failure.”
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