Decentralized Image Retrieval for Education (DIRECT)

分散式图像检索教育（DIRECT）项目正在为国家中小企业数字图书馆项目开发一种基于内容的对等图像检索（CBIR）服务。CBIR允许用户指定查询图像，以便服务可以在库中搜索类似内容的图像。DIRECT不通过文本元数据而是通过图像对象的颜色、纹理和形状来匹配图像。有了这样一个系统，NSDL的用户不需要知道专门的语言来启动搜索。此外，匹配过程不依赖于编目员描述和用户描述之间的匹配。该系统可用于NSDL中的所有集合，而无需强加新的标准或协议。这为NSDL提供了支持尚未编目或具有不完整元数据的图像的承诺，而无需图像收集提供商或聚合器产生额外的编目开销。

The Decentralized Image Retrieval for Education (DIRECT) project is developing a peer-to-peer content based image retrieval (CBIR) service for the National SMETE Digital Library program. CBIR allows the user to designate a query image so that the service can search the library for images of similar content. DIRECT matches images not by text metadata but by the color, texture, and shape of the image objects. With such a system the users of the NSDL do not need to know specialized languages to initiate a search. Furthermore, the matching process does not depend on a match between the cataloguer description and the user description. The system is available to all collections in the NSDL without imposing new standards or protocols. This offers the promise for the NSDL to support images that have not yet been cataloged or have incomplete metadata, without the image collection provider or aggregator having to incur additional cataloging overhead.