Real-Time Exploration of Multimedia Collections

With the huge expansion of smart devices and mobile applications, the ordinary users are consistently changing the conventional similarity search model. The users want to explore the multimedia data, so the typical query-by-example principle and the well-known keyword searching have become just a part of more complex retrieval processes. The emerging multimedia exploration systems with robust back-end retrieval system based on state of the art similarity search techniques provide a good solution. They enable interactive exploration process and implement exploration queries tightly connected with the user interface. However, they do not consider larger response times that might occur. To overcome this, we propose a scalable exploration system RTExp that allows evaluating the similarity queries in the near real time depending on user preferences (speed / precision). We describe building parts of the system and discuss various real-time characteristics for the exploration process. Also we provide results from the experimental evaluation of time-limited similarity queries and corresponding exploration operations.