The SAPIR Project: Executing A/V Complex Queries in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Searching for non-text data (eg, images) is mostly done by means of metadata annotations or by extracting the text close to the data. However, supporting real content-based audio-visual search, based on similarity search on features, is significantly more expensive than searching for text. Moreover, the search exhibits linear scalability with respect to the data set size. The European project SAPIR is currently addressing this problem.