Quick and Easy Implementation of Approximate Similarity Search with Lucene

Similarity search technique has been proved to be an effective way for retrieving multimedia content. However, as the amount of available multimedia data increases, the cost of developing from scratch a robust and scalable system with content-based image retrieval facilities is quite prohibitive. In this paper, we propose to exploit an approach that allows us to convert low level features into a textual form. In this way, we are able to easily set up a retrieval system on top of the Lucene search engine library that combines full-text search with approximate similarity search capabilities.