Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-01775-9

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

The efficient fast‑response content‑based image retrieval using spark

and MapReduce model framework
D. Mansoor Hussain1 · D. Surendran1

Received: 21 October 2019 / Accepted: 6 February 2020

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract
Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a way of querying image databases. CBIR looks at visual properties of an image
as “search terms” and returns pictures from a database that share the same or almost similar visual properties. Most CBIR
systems in the literature works by extracting the image color, texture and shape features before comparing them with those
in the database and then compute the distance between features of images for retrieval purposes. In this proposed work, we
use a MapReduce model framework to index the large-scale images and Spark has been used as a proportionate method of
retrieving the index, which runs on the higher layer of MapReduce and Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) environment.
HDFS provides an in-memory data storage and fast retrieval mechanism using the indexing process. The image retrieval
is performed in alignment with the K-Nearest Neighbour’s model using Apache implementation. The processing time has
been evaluated with the Hadoop framework in CBIR. The proposed approach takes 10% less time to index images than the
distributed image segmentation method discussed in the literature.

Keywords  MapReduce · Hadoop · CBIR · KNN algorithm · Spark

1 Introduction searching performs the query processing of the image with

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is one approach to
search photos from your phone, tablet, desktop or website.
Color, shape and texture features are the common and most
popular features mined for image matching and retrieval. In
our survey, we found that several researchers also used these
three features to propose a retrieval system (Mezzoudj et al.
2019). Similarity measures are conducted to measure simi-
larity and differences between each method and feature. It is
also used to define which method is the most efficient one for
CBIR systems (Liu and Yang 2013). Indexing and searching
are the two major tasks for retrieval. Indexing performs the
operation of extracting the best matched vector to identify
the image and map them accordingly in the database, while
* D. Mansoor Hussain
mansoor.slm@gmail.com
D. Surendran
d.surendran@gmail.com
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology,
Coimbatore, India
the computational vector in the database.
The rapid advances in VLSI design producing higher
processing power, higher bandwidth through broadband
networks and data compression standards are driving the
creation of high-volume image data, along with proficient
compression and communication over high-bandwidth chan-
nels. At the same time, this fiery growth of multimedia data
throws a new set of challenges for users in terms of storage
and retrieval. Text-based indexing and retrieval are no more
optimal solution for managing huge multimedia repositories.
Also, a local system may not be sufficient to process the
huge database of images and a client–server model is hence
needed for efficient image indexing and searching.
Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is a distributed
file system, which is vastly fault tolerant and offers better
throughput access to data (Talib et al. 2013). It is now an
Apache Hadoop sub-project having master slave architecture
with single name node and multiple data nodes. File system
name space, managed by the name node, regulates access
to files by their respective clients. It also maintains the file
to block mapping, location, block orders and other related
metadata. The data node on the other hand stores file data as
blocks and sends report or feedback to name node. Once the

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Vol.:(0123456789)

Fig. 1  A typical CBIR system
mapping is done, the client can interact with the data node
directly for reading or writing blocks.
HDFS is written in JAVA and sits on the native filesystem
irrespective of the OS. MapReduce is a processing paradigm
associated with HDFS that helps to process the data effec-
tively on different clusters available in the network. MapRe-
duce is a parallel processing method for handling data dis-
tributed on a commodity cluster (Manoharan and Sathappan
2012). The role of Mappers is to map input key/value pairs
to a set of transitional key/value pairs. They are the separable
tasks that transform input records into intermediate records.
Shuffling is the next stage or process, which exchanges these
outputs from the map tasks to reducers. Reducer will finally
reduce a set of these intermediate values, which share a key
to a smaller set of values.
For the CBIR system, we are proposing to use a tech-
nique that can speed up the large scale image database
indexing using the HDFS. The proposed work is divided
in to two parts (a) the distributed file processing is done in
the image database with the HDFS setup. The performance
of the image searching and indexing with the retrieval is
good enough in HDFS and it is faster with the unstructured
databases such as Hive or any other big databases (Liu et al.
2007). (b) The image searching in the big databases is done
Fig. 2  MapReduce framework
13
D. M. Hussain, D. Surendran
with the KNN algorithm, which has no assumptions and
very easy to implement for multi-class problems. In KNN
algorithm, the processing time, memory usage and the com-
putation processing are less compared to the Support Vector
Machine (SVM) and Naïve Baiyes theorem. The parallel
K-NN is used along with the Spark with main focus on the
computation and processing time. The computation is done
with the cache model and non-cache model in the Spark
architecture (Jalaja et al. 2005). The work comprises of com-
parative survey with the Spark based CBIR mechanism to
predict the computation time and the model framework.
2 Literature survey
The increased usage of mobile devices has led to increased
amount of multimedia data especially images and conse-
quently retrieving the needed ones from a pool of images
has become a great challenge in computer vision and image
processing domains. Several techniques have been discussed
in the literature for image retrieval using primitive features,
logical features and abstract attributes (Kwak et al. 2001,
Mirmehdi et al. 1998, Smith and Chang 1996). Most CBIR
systems work efficiently only at the lowest levels, while the
demand from consumers for retrieval is higher. CBIR appli-
cations are widespread in medicine, fashion, publishing,
architecture, crime prevention etc. Text descriptors are relied
upon for indexing practice, but the effectiveness of such sys-
tems are not very much evident. User satisfaction with such
systems varies considerably. Moreover the semantic feature
extraction from the images still remains as an active research
topic. IBM’s QBIC, Excalibur’s Retrieval Ware and Virage’s
VIR Image Engine are some commercially available CBIR
systems. While digitisation itself is not sufficient to man-
age the image database, some advanced techniques in image
indexing, searching and cataloguing is necessary for efficient
and effective image retrieval. Figure 1 below represents a
typical CBIR system.
Researchers have been working on different issues
in CBIR domain including object identification, pattern
The efficient fast‑response content‑based image retrieval using spark and MapReduce model…
recognition etc. The general CBIR methods and techniques
along with the issues have been discussed by Smeulders
and Gupta (2000), while the recent challenges have been
reviewed by Zhou et al. (2017).
Speeding up the CBIR system results is another active
area of research on top of the feature extraction techniques.
Mezzoudj et al. have discussed a parallel CBIR system using
Spark and Tachyon frameworks (Mezzoudj et al. 2019).
There are different framework models discussed in the litera-
ture including MapReduce model, HIPI framework, HDFS
etc. to name a few. Apache Spark for processing large-scale
data on various nodes is a recent MapReduce based frame-
work and Hedjazi et al. (2018) has shown that Spark system
works better than Hadoop for batch processing. The Hadoop
has been used with the HBase for the image retrieval and the
memory support system. The image retrieval is supported
with the cluster environment using a distributed file system.
The indexing step is associated with the HBase system in
the storage layer in the segmented approach (Tamura et al.
1978).
The MapReduce computing uses HDFS support system in
order to enhance the searching phenomenon in the memory
processing and the storage layer (Kekre et al. 2010). Hadoop
MapReduce along with HBase provokes a searching method
with some issues, which have been overcome with the pro-
posed method (Lin et al. 2003). Lowe presented a method for
finding features that are invariant to image rotation, scaling,
Fig. 3  Image indexing and
metadata information extraction
which provides a robust matching. Local tetra patterns have
been used with the vector techniques to present the features
in a CBIR system (Lowe 2004).
The Hadoop MapReduce framework makes the clos-
est path for the query image with the better CBIR system.
Apache Spark based on the Avro framework combines the
picture files and provides an in-memory order to allow the
actions to happen much faster. HDFS supports Java pro-
grams and encloses portable file system with scalability
features and also distributed across different machines. The
parallel and distributed iterative approaches have been con-
sidered by the researchers to maximize the computation time
in KNN method. The KNN graph has been constructed with
the large-scale applications with the support of tree-based
structure in the network. A simple and efficient parallel
application has been used with the MapReduceK-Nearest
Neighbor (MR-KNN) and a custom based application in a
cluster (Rui et al. 1996). Gaber et al. proposed an algorithm
to extract the image features through Scale Invariant Fea-
ture Transformation (SIFT) and matched it on the database
features using Hadoop platform (Gaber et al. 2016). They
found that the retrieval performance is better due to paral-
lelization capabilities of the Hadoop MapReduce program-
ming paradigm.
13

3 Related technologies and approaches
The concepts, frameworks and tools used in our work are
discussed in this section along with the limitations and the
solutions to overcome them. We detail about MapReduce
for indexing purposes and KNN for search and retrieval
purposes.
MapReduce developed by Google is a software design
model for large scale applications such as image storage and
retrieval. This methodology streamlines the parallel pro-
gramming through different nodes. The two main Hadoop
components are the Hadoop storage, which is handled by the
Hadoop HDFS and the other one is data processing, which is
handled by the MapReduce. Here MapReduce is the process-
ing component of Apache Hadoop. It processes data parallel
in distributed environment as shown in Fig. 2. The data are
stored in all the clusters or the slave machines and MapRe-
duce sends the logic to the respective data nodes, where the
data reside as HDFS blocks. The processing is executed over
a smaller chunk of data in multiple locations in parallel sav-
ing time as well as network bandwidth.
KNN is the technique used for finding the distance
between the features extracted from the query image and
those in the database. KNN is a simple algorithm that
stocks all the available inputs and classifies the new test
data based on a comparison measure. Given N feature vec-
tors, KNN algorithm finds the KNN of ‘c’, irrespective of
the labels, where ‘c’ is the feature vector. KNN works better
with smaller input variables and the main drawback of this
algorithm is the complexity in searching the nearest neigh-
bors for each sample. There are several distance measure-
ments that can be used for calculating the distance between
the features. The most common of them is the Euclidean
distance, which refers to the path distance connecting two
points. Manhattan distance on the other hand corresponds
to the distance between two points calculated as the sum of
the total differences of their Cartesian coordinates. Cosine
similarity is another popular method, which refers to the
normalized dot product of the two attributes.
Fig. 4  LBP texture analysis
13
D. M. Hussain, D. Surendran
If the two points are represented as a (­ x1, ­y1) and b ­(x2,
y­ 2) in xy-plane, then the Euclidean distance is calculated
as:
√
( )2 ( )2
x1 − x2 + y1 − y2 (1)
Similarly, the Manhattan distance is calculated as:
|x1 − x2 | + |y1 − y2 |
| | | | (2)
Run time and memory consumption are the major issues
and an Apache Spark environment helps to parallelize
this KNN algorithm as an iterative MapReduce process.
Apache Spark is an open source dispersed cluster computing
framework model containing multiple different algorithms
including K-means, linear regression etc. But we need to
implement KNN in an optimized manner and the details are
discussed in the next section.
4 Proposed method for image indexing
and searching
We propose to use CBIR with Spark based image retrieval
mechanism for a huge data set. Our framework uses HDFS
for efficient storage of the feature vectors. K-NN algorithm
when implemented with the cache method helps to do the
distance computation and retrieval part in an optimized man-
ner. Our framework regulates the MapReduce and Spark
architecture to speed up the CBIR system. Our approach
brings in two advantages:
(a) MapReduce parallelization provides quicker indexing
on large scale image database and HDFS helps reduce
the time and memory in storing the images on different
clusters
(b) K-NN method optimized on Spark framework identifies
the neighbouring images and rank them for retrieval
module in the CBIR system
The metadata information with query indexing for Spark
processing is depicted in Fig. 3.
In CBIR system, the Spark connects the frameworks
with the segmentation of large-scale image scaling system
in the distributed framework. The MapReduce framework
uses the HDFS survey in the memory-centric distributed
system having multiple read/write operations carried
out at optimized speed. The application programming
interface (API) in the data frame and Resilient Distrib-
uted Data (RDD) provides the path specification in the
Spark protocol. The proposed CBIR Spark system with
the indexing module enhances the usage of interaction
with the key/value pairs. The indexing step provides the
The efficient fast‑response content‑based image retrieval using spark and MapReduce model…

Fig. 5  Dataset categories

Table 1  Image indexing time Images Apache Proposed “reducers” that take care of identifying the definitive neigh-
consumption across different AVRO system (s) bors from the map phase output.
images (s)

2000 260 180

4.1 Image indexing and storage
5000 510 438
The image indexing phase covers the Spark usage with
10,000 1003 856
HDFS and takes care of allocating the data with the prede-
15,000 1490 1190
fined consumption of data management. The input images
20,000 1980 1465
are loaded using the file system with the in-memory file
allocation in the memory management. Color images are
first converted in to gray-scale and scaled to a fixed size.
large-scale images to be utilized with the MapReduce par- Then the features from the image are extracted. The texture
allel on Spark establishment. Thein-memory specification gives details on the spatial arrangement of pixel values in a
provides the time for storing the image features. It has to selected region or a whole image. They help in image seg-
be retained with the ‘write’ action and the throughput is mentation or image classification. Compared to image color
observed to be gradually increasing with the on-demand and shape features, texture features gives better results in a
memory requirements. CBIR system and so it is preferred in our work. Local binary
The retrieval phase is the second part of the CBIR sys- pattern (LBP), one of the effective image descriptors is used
tem, which prescribes the steps of dedicating the interaction for texture feature extraction. Figure 4 represents the LBP
between the query vectors with the most feasible dataset texture analysis for 6 and 8 neighbors.
features identified as vector representations in the input file LBPs local representation is made by comparing every
creation. The “map” phase of our proposed system com- pixel value with its neighbour values and a binary result is
putes the KNN on different clusters followed by the multiple produced.

Table 2  Different image indexing techniques for 12,000 images

Approach Methods Time (s)

Centralized method Sequence based method 700.000

Distributed image segmentation method Single node HBase method and MapReduce control over single nodes 290.000
Distributed image segmentation method Multiple node HBase method and MapReduce control over 12 nodes 2.98
Distributed image segmentation method Multiple node HBase method and MapReduce control over 24 nodes 1.98
Proposed KNN approach KNN method with Spark 220

13
 D. M. Hussain, D. Surendran

Table 3  Searching time comparison for different datasets 5

Total number of KNN with spark KNN with spark and HDFS 4.5
Images (s) in memory computation (s)
4
2000 183 115 3.5
5000 440 270 3
10,000 820 510 2.5
15,000 1190 710 HDSF
2
20,000 1510 895
1.5
Other
1 SVM
and
0.5 AVRO
5 K-NN with
0
spark
4.5
0 4000 8000 14000
4

Time
3.5 K-NN with Number of nodes
Spark and
3 HDFS in
memory
2.5 computation
Fig. 7  Indexing time for different data sets
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
0 4000 8000 14000
Time

Total Number of Images

Fig. 6  Search time for different data sets

( )
K
2
−1
∑ ( )2
LBPS(a, b) = V Gi − Gi+(k∕2) ,
j=0 (3)
{
1
where the value V(x) implies V(X) = if X > 00
0

and the Gi − Gi+(k∕2) values represent the gray level of the

symmetric point axis in the equally spaced region of the
image data set in the entire region over the control. The
radius of the pixel over the entire data set has been obscured
with the image coverage of the ‘N’ pixels with the radius of
‘R’. In the MapReduce framework, the map stage will load
the images from HDFS and extract the feature vectors, while
the Reduce stage will save these vectors in the clusters of the
Hadoop file system.
The Mapper job has to be executed with the loading of the
training RDD in HDFS set up with the RDD text file to be
mapped in terms of the instructional vector. Resilient Dis-
tributed Data set creates MLIb vectors for all the features.
The LBPS uses the job control factors to be done with the
sequence number calculation with the transformation signs
in the network. The feature formation with index formation
Fig. 8  Comparison of different searching methods
has been used in the RDD zip file for extracting the vector
feature extraction. Finally, the distance between the feature
vectors in the database and the query image is found and
sorted for retrieval purposes. While the mappers and reduc-
ers run in parallel, it’s the shuffle module in between them
takes care of rearranging the data for the subsequent steps to
run. The results from the mapper having the same key will
be sent to the same reducer by the shuffle module.
4.2 Image ranking and retrieval
Once the search is complete, it is equally important to rank
the images before they are displayed in order. The image

13
The efficient fast‑response content‑based image retrieval using spark and MapReduce model…
content descriptors like the texture feature that are matching
to the query image are ranked higher than those with lesser
match. Precision indicates the proposed CBIR system’s abil-
ity to retrieve images among the relevant ones, while recall
designates the fraction of pertinent instances retrieved over
the database relevant instances.
4.3 SPARK based KNN algorithm implementation
The algorithm for implementing the K-NN algorithm in
Apache Spark is detailed below:
5 Results and discussions
We have used the Corel-10 k dataset that has 10,000 images
in different categories. The contents include sunset, build-
ings, car, beaches, flowers, fish, mountains, food, door etc.
The images are in JPEG compressed format with size vary-
ing from 192 × 128 to 128 × 192. As part of pre-processing
stage, we decompress the images and rescale it before con-
verting them in to gray scale and store it for further feature
extraction process. A glimpse of the image set is shown in
Fig. 5. We have tested our proposed solution both using a
single node and a multi node cluster. Both the master and the
slave are present in the same node in case of a single-node
cluster and they exist independently for multi-node cluster.
Table 1 shows the time taken for indexing the images present
in the dataset.
We have also compared the indexing time across different
methods that are discussed in the literature and we find that
our method takes the least time for indexing as compared to
the existing ones. The performance of the proposed system
has to be established with the indexing to be followed in the
HDFS and the system is compared against various segmen-
tations as follows:
• Centralized method
• Distributed image segmentation method single node
13

• Distributed image segmentation method multiple node
(12)
• Distributed image segmentation methodmultiple node
(24)
• Proposed KNN approach
• Proposed KNN approach with HDFS and spark.
This is shown in Table 2.
We also studied the searching module for the time taken
to compute while using Spark and HDFS in memory com-
putation. This is presented in Table 3.
Cache module with the KNN algorithm running in parallel
helps avoid the re-computations of RDD’s as discussed before.
As the data set size increases, cache method brings in a huge
difference in terms of search time and is evident from Table 3.
The average time consumed has been used in the compu-
tational parameter estimation based on different image size.
The KNN algorithm has been used in the computation time
estimation with the in-memory estimation. The average time
consumed for distance measurement across 20,000 images
is estimated as 760s.
We observed 42% reduction in time using the proposed
technique as compared to the traditional KNN method. Also,
when there are more number of nodes available for index-
ing and retrieval, the time taken for processing and retrieval
decreases accordingly. Figures 6 and 7 represent the time
consumed for searching with different data sets and the time
taken for indexing using cluster-based images.
Figure 8 represents the comparison of different search-
ing methods for 40,000 images in the dataset. The HDFS
with the proposed MapReduce framework helps to index and
retrieve images quicker than the traditional CBIR methods.
6 Conclusion and future directions
CBIR is an attractive area of research. While most of the
research focuses on effective feature extraction, we have
worked towards faster indexing and retrieval in this work.
MapReduce programming is preferred in the recent works
due to its suitability for distributed large scale data process-
ing. Similarly on the retrieval side, KNN has gained its
popularity due to its efficiency in classifying an unlabelled
data. We considered processing KNN queries on huge data-
sets, where the index is maintained in a computing cluster.
MapReduce framework offers quicker indexing and a par-
allel KNN algorithm with cache method helps to retrieve
images faster than native methods. We have addressed prob-
lems that arise due to MapReduce characteristics and also
used cache method in KNN algorithm for better results.
Multi node clusters as compared to the single node clusters
have improved the run time very much. Overall, the dis-
cussed approach gives a clear and detailed explanation on
13
D. M. Hussain, D. Surendran
the algorithms for processing KNN on MapReduce. This
work can also be used as a guide for KNN based problems
not just in CBIR domain, but for any practical problems in
the big data context. Every work will open upon new chal-
lenges and selecting the right number of clusters along with
tuning the value “K” in KNN would lead to further research.
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