Acceleration of a content-based image-retrieval application on the RDISK cluster

Because of the growing use of multimedia content over Internet, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has recently received a lot of interest. While accurate search techniques based on local image descriptors exist, they suffer from very long execution time. We propose to accelerate CBIR on the RDISK machine, a cluster of FPGA-enhanced hard-drives, that follows the philosophy of smart-disks. Our platform combines coarse and fine grain parallelism thanks to the concurrent use of the cluster nodes and of a programmable logic device. The implementation of the CBIR application on this mixed hardware/software platform follows a strict methodology, that was validated on realistic data-set (image database of more than 30,000 images). This methodology allows us to adapt the original algorithm to suit a hardware implementation, and to select the values of some key design parameters to maximize global performance. Our preliminary results indicate that speed-ups between 120 and 200 could be obta...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Auguste Noumsi, Steven Derrien, Patrice Quinton
• Keywords: CBIR, Content-based Image Retrieval, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2006, Local Image Descriptors