Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval

Web search is dominated today by search giants like Google, Yahoo or MSN that deploy a centralized approach to indexing and utilize text only indexes enriched by page rank algorithms. Consequently, while it is possible to search for audio-visual content, it is limited to associated text and metadata annotations. Supporting real content-based audio-visual search requires media specific understanding and extremely high CPU utilization which would not scale in today's centralized solutions.

SAPIR aims at breaking this technological barrier by developing a large-scale distributed P2P architecture that will make it possible to search in audio-visual content using the query by example paradigm. "A picture is worth a thousand words" so using an image taken by a cell phone to find information about e.g. a monument we bump into or singing a melody as a search hint for a full song, combined with optional metadata annotations and user and social networking context will provide the next level of search capabilities and precision of retrieved results. Our vision is to conduct innovative research that will lead to a technology where end-users are peers that can produce audiovisual content from their mobile devices. This content will be indexed by super-peers across a scalable P2P network to enable content search in real-time while respecting IPR and protecting against spam.

To this end, SAPIR brings experts in audio-visual content analysis together with strong partners in Information Retrieval and in P2P technologies. To further improve audio-visual retrieval and navigation SAPIR's consortium combines experts in Mobile devices technology with experts in Social networking nd in IPR to enable a secure and trusted environment.

Having such a technology can provide significant advantage to the European community over existing centralized text only search engines and can be applied in various fields of applications such as tourism, government services, healthcare and more.