gnuift

GNU Image Finding Tool - index and search images by content

The GIFT (the GNU Image-Finding Tool) is a Content Based Image Retrieval System (CBIRS). It enables you to do Query By Example on images, giving you the opportunity to improve query results by relevance feedback. For processing your queries the program relies entirely on the content of the images, freeing you from the need to annotate all images before querying the collection. The GIFT comes with a tool which lets you index whole directory trees containing images in one go. You then can use the GIFT server and its client, to browse your own image collections. The GIFT is an open framework. The developers explicitly have taken into account the possibility of adding new ways of querying to the framework. The communication protocol for client-server communication, MRML, is XML based and fully documented (http://www.mrml.net). This aims at promoting code reuse among researchers and application developers. The current version of the GIFT can be seen in action at http://viper.unige.ch/demo/ The GIFT (ex Viper) is the result of a research effort at the Vision Group at the CUI (computer science center) of the University of Geneva (see http://vision.unige.ch/). This cutting-edge research has been the subject of several publications and conference talks. Details can be found at http://viper.unige.ch/. To avoid a name clash with the "gift" package (a fasttrack filesharing client), these packages have been named "gnuift" (also to stress that gnuift is a GNU project).