A Distributed Content-Based Search Engine Based on Mobile Code and Web Service Technology

Abstract

Current search engines crawl the Web, download content, and digest this
content locally. For multimedia content, this involves considerable volumes
of data. Furthermore, this process covers only publicly available content
because content providers are concerned that they otherwise loose control
over the distribution of their intellectual property. We present the
prototype of our secure and distributed search engine, which dynamically
pushes content based feature extraction to image providers. Thereby, the
volume of data that is transported over the network is significantly
reduced, and the concerns mentioned above are alleviated. The distribution
of feature extraction and matching algorithms is done by mobile software
agents. Subsequent search requests performed upon the resulting feature
indices by means of remote feature comparison can either be realized through
mobile software agents, or by the use of implicitly created Web services
which wrap the remote comparison functionality, and thereby improve the
interoperability of the search engine. We give a description of the search
engine's architecture and implementation, depict our concepts to integrate
agent and Web service technology, and present quantitative evaluation
results. Furthermore, we discuss related security mechanisms for content
protection and server security.