Brief History
This site features the content-based image retrieval research that was developed originally at Stanford University in the late 1990s by Jia Li, James Z. Wang, and Gio Wiederhold. Li and Wang are currently with Penn State and conduct research related to image big data. More information about their Penn State research can be found from their groups' websites (Li group, Wang group).

While at Stanford University, Li was with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments, Wang was with the Medical Information Sciences program and the Computer Science department, and Wiederhold was a faculty member of the Computer Science department. They collaborated on the original SIMPLIcity system development in 1998 and subsequently on related publications. The aim back then was to be able to provide content-based image retrieval functions for millions of images in real time on a single CPU of a standard PC. The CPU speed and capabilities back then were quite limited in today's standard. But the team was able to overcome the challenges through developing some new statistical and computational methods. Also, the work pioneered the concept of integrating semantic classification in the retrieval of images. The Integrated Region Matching (IRM) distance they have developed opened new possibilities regarding the use of the Wasserstein metric for big data problems.

System Architecture
TM
Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture Libraries

Publications
The publications related to the research at Stanford have been widely cited by other scientists around the world. For example, according to Google Scholar, the SIMPLIcity journal paper has been cited for over 2500 times. Main original publications related to the Stanford work include

• James Z. Wang, Jia Li, Gio Wiederhold, ``SIMPLIcity: Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture LIbraries,'' IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol 23, no. 9, pp. 947-963, 2001. (download)
• Jia Li, James Z. Wang, Gio Wiederhold, ``IRM: Integrated Region Matching for Image Retrieval,'' Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 147-156, 2000. (download)
• James Z. Wang, Jia Li, Desmond Chan, Gio Wiederhold, ``Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture LIbraries,'' D-Lib, vol 5, no. 11, 1999. (download)

The research has also been shown to be useful in a range of applications including pathology, art, satellite imaging, and Web image retrieval. Some representative publications in these areas include

• James Z. Wang, ``Pathfinder: Multiresolution Region-Based Searching of Pathology Images Using IRM,'' Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Proceedings of the AMIA Annual Symposium, vol. 2000 symposium suppl., pp. 883-887, Los Angeles, CA, November 2000. (download)
• James Z. Wang, Jia Li and Ching-chih Chen, ``Interdisciplinary Research to Advance Digital Imagery Indexing and Retrieval Technologies for Asian Art and Cultural Heritages,'' Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, in conjunction with ACM Multimedia, 6 pages, Juan Les Pins, France, ACM, December 2002. (download)
• Ashish Parulekar, Ritendra Datta, Jia Li and James Z. Wang, ``Large-scale Satellite Image Browsing using Automatic Semantic Categorization and Content-based Retrieval,'' Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Knowledge in Computer Vision, in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, 8 pages, abstract on pp. 1873 of Proc. ICCV Workshops, Beijing, China, IEEE, October 2005. (download)
• Dhiraj Joshi, Ritendra Datta, Ziming Zhuang, WP Weiss, Marc Friedenberg, James Z. Wang and Jia Li, ``PARAgrab: A Comprehensive Architecture for Web Image Management and Multimodal Querying,'' Proceedings of the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Demonstration, pp. 1163-1166, Seoul, Korea, September 2006. (download)

Later, Li, Wang, and two other researchers Drs. R. Datta and D. Joshi, wrote a high-impact article on image retrieval.

• Ritendra Datta, Dhiraj Joshi, Jia Li and James Z. Wang, ``Image Retrieval: Ideas, Influences, and Trends of the New Age,'' ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 40, no. 2, article 5, pp. 5:1-60, April 2008. (download)

Demo
Our demo server suffered from a security issue around 2011-2012 and we have just been able to re-establish some of the demo services. More demos will be coming. You can try our system using the following link(s).

• 60,000-image Dataset: Go to DEMO
  
  

You can also visit one of the sites that is currently running our system for real-world image data: TerraGalleria.com - the on-line galleries of travel, adventure, landscape, and nature photography by QT Luong. Enjoy. An example query result.

Obtain the System
If you are interested in obtaining the search engine, please contact Dr. James Wang. His current contact information is kept on his personal web page.

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