A decentralized image retrieval system for education

We describe the development of a decentralized image retrieval system for education (DIRECT). With DIRECT, content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a service that will run autonomously; the constituent collections will not need to be modified to accommodate DIRECT. DIRECT applies a consistent CBIR mechanism to the entire system and gives CBIR functionality to collections without effort by the collection providers. Collections that do not have their own CBIR system or are not able to invest in a CBIR system (such as small collections or collections that do not contain a large proportion of images) will gain greater distribution of their holdings via DIRECT's CBIR functionality. The DIRECT service finds the collections in the library and requests the images using the same method that the portal uses to search and request images. DIRECT will perform feature extraction on the images and store the features in its own database. A portal or client application can query DIRECT, and it will use the features of the desired image to search the library for images with the same features. DIRECT will automatically monitor collections in order to keep the DIRECT index up-to-date.