An Efficiency Comparison of Two Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems, GIFT and PicSOM

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) addresses the problem of assisting a user to retrieve images from unannotated databases, based on features that can be automatically derived from the images. Today, there exists several CBIR systems based on different methods. Only few attemps to benchmark these have been made, although the usefulness of benchmarking is undeniable in the development of different algorithms. In this paper we publish our benchmarking results of two CBIR systems with different implementation methods. The CBIR systems in question are GIFT (University of Geneva) and PicSOM (Helsinki University of Technology). The results clearly show that our PicSOM system, which we earlier have not been able to benchmark against other CBIR systems, comes off well in the comparison. Also, the results indicate that tests based on a single ground truth class are not enough for fair system comparisons.