A generic content-based image retrieval framework for mobile devices

Multimedia mobile devices have created new possibilities for developing and accessing a variety of multimedia items such as images, audio and video clips. Personal multimedia items are, nowadays, being consumed at an enormous rate. Therefore, the management of these media items has become a pressing problem. In this paper, a client-server content-based image retrieval framework for mobile platforms is developed, which provides the capability of content-based query and browsing from mobile devices. The proposed framework provides an adaptive user interface and a generic structure, which supports a wide range of mobile devices. In this framework, a client requests the server for retrieval of particular images with a particular content. The server performs a content-based retrieval of images from a selected database and streams the retrieved results back to the client in an efficient way. The query results are transmitted over a wireless network and a certain number of similar images are rendered on the mobile device screen using thumbnail sizes. The proposed framework serves as a basis of content-based image retrieval on mobile devices. It addresses several important challenges such as hardware and software limitations as well as efficient use of the available network bandwidth.