Similarity-measure-based VLSI searching system for MPEG-7

In this paper, a general-purpose similarity-measure searching hardware system for MPEG-7 is proposed using VLSI Associative Processor (AP) chips. The system downloads MPEG-7 data from large volume of multimedia databases on the Internet into the on-chip cache memory of an AP, then performs similarity-based search in an extremely short time. Although the similarity-based search processing is computationally very expensive by software, latency free search has become possible due to the highly parallel maximum-likelihood search architecture of the AP chip. In this study, the hardware-accelerated searching on a client´s computer is introduced. In this solution, an AP chip is embedded in a personal computer; a person can enjoy a very comfortable interactive preference search all in a response time less than 10^-3 sec. As an example, a house design e-commerce application, where data is transferred in the MPEG-7 vector format, has been developed. Using a prototype AP chip implemented in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), the effectiveness of such application systems has been demonstrated.