Scalable solar image Retrieval with Lucene

In this work we present an alternative approach for large-scale retrieval of solar images using the highly-scalable retrieval engine Lucene. While Lucene is widely popular among text- based search engines, significant adjustments need to be made to take advantage of its fast indexing mechanism and highly-scalable architecture to enable search on image repositories. In this work we describe a novel way of representing image feature vectors in order to enable Lucene to perform search and retrieval of similar images. We compare our proposed method with other popular alternatives and provide commentary of the performance as well as the benefits and caveats of the proposed method.