Parallelization and optimization of a CBVIR system on multi-core architectures

Technique advances have made image capture and storage very convenient, which results in an explosion of the amount of visual information. It becomes difficult to find useful information from these tremendous data. Content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) is emerging as one of the best solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, CBVIR is a very compute-intensive task. Nowadays, with the boom of multi-core processors, CBVIR can be accelerated by exploiting multi-core processing capability. In this paper, we propose a parallelization implementation of a CBVIR system facing to server application and use some serial and parallel optimization techniques to improve its performance on an 8-core and on a 16-core systems. Experimental results show that optimized implementation can achieve very fast retrieval on the two multi-core systems. We also compare the performance of the application on the two multi-core systems and give an explanation of the performance difference between the two systems. Furthermore, we conduct detailed scalability and memory performance analysis to identify possible bottlenecks in the application. Based on these experimental results and performance analysis, we gain many insights into developing efficient applications on future multi-core architectures.