DIRS: Distributed image retrieval system based on MapReduce

With information technology developing rapidly, variety and quantity of image data is increasing fast. How to retrieve desired images among massive images storage is getting to be an urgent problem. In this paper, we established a Distributed Image Retrieval System (DIRS), in which images are retrieved in a content-based way, and the retrieval among massive image data storage is speeded up by utilizing MapReduce distributed computing model. Moreover, fault tolerance, ability to run in a heterogeneous environment and scalability are supported in our system. Experiments are carried out to verify the improvement of performance when MapReduce model is utilized. Results have shown that image storage and image retrieval based on MapReduce outperform that in centralized way greatly when total number of images is large.