Exploiting peer relations for distributed multimedia information retrieval

In this paper, we propose a multimedia information retrieval framework in distributed networks, which is suitable for both cooperative and non-cooperative environments and resistant to biased content summaries. The relations of peers are established and evolved according to their historical interactions, which are computed with a peer reputation model. Peers sharing the same topic tend to group themselves together. The resulting structure of the network is exploited to facilitate distributed information retrieval. The characteristic of the network structure is used to infer the content of non-cooperative peers, as well as refining possibly biased content summaries provided by peers. A query forwarding algorithm is introduced for the routing of queries. Simulation experiments show good performance of the proposed method. ©2009 IEEE.