Energy conservation by adaptive feature loading for mobile content-based image retrieval

Abstract

We present an adaptive loading scheme to save energy for content based image retrieval (CBIR) in a mobile system. In CBIR, images are represented and compared by high-dimensional vectors called features. Loading these features into memory and comparing them consumes a significant amount of energy. Our method adaptively reduces the features to be loaded into memory for each query image. The reduction is achieved by estimating the difficulty of the query and by reusing cached features in memory for subsequent queries. We implement our method on a PDA and obtain overall energy reduction of 61.3% compared with an existing CBIR implementation.