isk-daemon: Content-based image database server

Version 0.6 – Released 21/July/2007

1. Support for keyword management:
   1. Keywords could be used to identify users so isk-daemon can keep track of which images belongs to which user. This way you can do keyword-related queries on isk-daemon in order to query for similar images inside a user’s collection.
   2. Keywords can be interpreted as being just set identifiers, so in a sense this allows your application to tell isk-daemon which sets an image belongs to.
   3. These ids may be generated by hashing text-based keywords from an existing keyword oriented image management system.
   4. Only keyword ids (integers) are stored on isk-daemon
2. More example Java, PHP and Python client libraries.
3. Improved web admin interface.
4. Internal support for multiple image database spaces so image databases can be segmented into partitions (also called database spaces) and persisted to different data files or a single file for all database spaces.
5. Trial and Full versions are now delivered on the same build. Full version users must enter a valid license key on the settings.py file. Existing full version users will receive a valid key.
6. Many bug fixes.
7. Indexed image can be associated with keywords and new search methods are available for using keywords to narrow down the visual similarity search space.
8. Memory leaks fixed.

Version 0.6.1 – Released 7/Aug/2007

1. Windows version is now linked against the latest ImageMagick release.

Version 0.6.2 – Released 30/Aug/2007

1. All trial restrictions removed.
2. Released as opensource (GPL).
3. File packages now hosted on SourceForge.net
4. SF.net bug tracker is now used

The roadmap for the upcoming months including the major milestones is as follows. Bug fixes shall be available immediately as intermediary releases.

Release 0.7 – March/2010

1. Basic support for a cluster of daemons, improving scalability and performance. See more details on the initial cluster architecture.
2. Support for cluster configuration on web admin interface.
3. Improved support for multiple database spaces on the web admin interface.
4. Optionally save image filenames associated to imported images.
5. Alternative querying modes: by average color and improved flexibility for similarity queries (parameters for the weight given to color and shape similarity)
6. Improvements to Database management
7. Command to remove databases
8. Database access statistics
9. Documentation for using isk-daemon modules as a library for building image similarity applications (so in a sense isk-daemon would be basically an XML-RPC/SOAP/POX frontend to this library)
10. On Windows, image filenames with extended characters won’t get imported
11. saveDbAs() is not remembering the supplied filename, so further calls to saveDb() will save to a file named “not yet saved” instead of the previous one.
12. allow batch operations in order to minimize number of remote calls during normal operation
13. addMultipleImages
14. removeAll
15. removeIdRange
16. queryIDs

Release 0.8 – December/2010

1. Caching mechanism for improved performance and lower network usage (memcached support and bloom filters for image id exchange between server instances)
2. Improved network usage for cluster synchronization
3. Auto-discovery for cluster instances, so cluster instances don’t need to know by configuration time which other instances are available on the local network. Failover should then be completely transparent.
4. Support for querying based on signature processed at client-side, enabling web-based search by sketch. One example sketch applet shall be provided.
5. Improved API examples
6. Improved image querying operatios to the web admin interface, showing image thumbnails for results.
7. UTF-8 image filename support
8. design and implement REST interface
9. write pydocs for keyword-related methods
10. fix random kwd query bug
11. implement deleteImage method
12. more admin screenshots to the website and documentation
13. prettify C++ code and improve documentation/comments
14. references on documentation to POX (plain old XML) should be rephrased as XML-POST, POX-over-http or something like that to make terminology more clear
15. rerun all tests and sample clients, compose test suites
16. restructure imgdb.cpp into modules (major feature sets)
17. handle remote exceptions properly
18. more descriptive return codes for image management operations

Release 0.9 – June/2011

1. Support for image classification based on content similarity. The API would be extended to provide a method for querying which group an image belongs to and for training the internal classification engine by providing a group on the moment an image is added to the system. This should be based on some heuristic for determining set membership.

Release 1.0 – October/2011

1. segment video into scenes and index each scene as being just another image on database.
2. reuse code from VideoQuery
3. video support for some codecs (mpeg2, xvid, divx) and formats (mpg, mov, avi)