Compass: An Image Retrieval System for Distributed Databases

A currently relevant research field in information sciences is the management of non-traditional distributed multimedia databases. Three related key issues are achieving an effective content-based query-by-example retrieval, a fast response time and adapting image comparison strategies to user needs. This paper presents COMPASS, a distributed image retrieval system which provides novel solutions to these key issues. Statistical methods are used to quantify image descriptor effectiveness, to simplify user queries and to select an image comparison strategy which optimizes the search speed while preserving answer quality