Parallel Computing in Face Image Retrieval

Abstract

Modern digital photo collections contain vast multitudes of high-resolution color images, many containing faces, which are desirable to retrieve visually. This poses a problem for effective image browsing and calls for efficient Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) capabilities ensuring near-instantaneous visual query turn-around. This in turn necessitates parallelization of many existing image processing and information retrieval algorithms that can no longer satisfy the modern user demands, when executed sequentially. Hence a practical approach to Face Image Retrieval (FIR) is presented. It utilizes multi-core processing architectures to implement its major modules (e.g. face detection and matching) efficiently without sacrificing the image retrieval accuracy. The integration of FIR into a web-based family reunification system demonstrates the practicality of the proposed method. Several accuracy and speed evaluations on real-word data are presented and possible CBIR extensions are discussed.