Managed search multimedia search

November 07, 2024

Kevin Montgomery

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4 min. read

Image, Video, and Audio search can be challenging to build, but Managed Search gives you a powerful search platform to handle high volume search.

Beyond Keyword Search – Building Image and Video Search with Managed Search

Images, video and audio content can contain an extensive amount of information, but finding specific objects in an image, subjects in a video or topics in a recorded conversation can be difficult especially when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.

Multimedia search typically required extensive manual tagging and summarization just to generate a small amount of metadata to search. Advancements in machine learning, computer vision, audio processing and video interpretation can automatically extract meaningful information, deeper meta data and contextual information from multimedia files – but searching this vast array of information and keeping everything up to date requires a powerful large-scale search solution.

How Does Image and Video Search Work?

Like most search architectures – image, video and audio search typically requires extracting meaningful features from the source content and creating tokens, embeddings and signatures of those features that can be stored in an index. That index can then be searched and queried to return matching content based on exact matching criteria or content that is similar based on certain features.

Image, video, and audio search with Managed Search

Preprocessing Content

Extracting meaningful features from images, videos and audio can involve several steps depending on media format and what search features are required. Feature extraction includes machine learning and AI algorithms that can recognize objects, people, locations and other visual features as well as audio processing and transcription that identifies sounds, music, spoken words and other audio signals.

Metadata, Features, Signatures and Other Summary Data

Additional search fields can include metadata such as author, style, dimensions and other summary information about the media. Human-provided annotations can provide additional contextual information about media for easier search and retrieval.

Similar and Related Content

Effective search is more than just matching keywords and features to user’s search queries, providing similar and related media can greatly enhance the search experience and improve discovery. Different types of media may be similar or related by general theme, author, subject matter and more.

Different Ways to Search

Due to the vast amount and types of information stored in multimedia files users may need additional search features beyond basic keyword search.

Keyword Search with Filters

Basic text document search can provide a lot of functionality with just keyword search, but multimedia search may require additional filters, facets, and other inputs to accurately narrow down search results and allow users to take advantage of extracted features, tags and metadata.

Reverse Media Search

Reverse media search can be easily implemented by running an image, video, or audio file through the same preprocessing step to generate features and metadata that can then be used to find similar files. The tokens, signatures, features, and other discovered entities and data can then be fed into the search index to get similar files regardless of format.

Search by Theme

Another open-ended search and discovery feature for non-textual content is searching by “theme” – this can include visual themes, types of visuals (e.g. line drawings, photographs, illustrations), music type (e.g. chill music, party hits, classical) and color space (e.g. black and white, saturated, bright). Using visual and audio filters and search inputs can increase the number of search results and relevancy.

Search Infrastructure for Image, Video, and Audio Search

SearchStax Managed Search, built on Solr, includes the robust infrastructure needed for developing high volume search experiences including large scale image, video and audio search in addition to traditional text and document search. Managed Search includes 24/7 support, security updates and backups for reliable search that scales with your business.

API Integration

Managed Search includes the powerful Solr searching, indexing and tagging API endpoints along with infrastructure orchestration, deployment and management APIs so you can easily integrate Managed Search with product, deployment and monitoring systems.

Security and Updates

Managed Search includes security features, software updates and technical support to keep your search service running flawlessly without additional management and staffing overhead. Your product team can reliably build and deploy search-powered features and workflows while maintaining compliance and following security best-practices.

Getting Started with Managed Search

Schedule a Demo to learn more about Managed Search and how you can build reliable scalable search experiences without the headaches of infrastructure management. Our experts can help you learn more about scalable search infrastructure management and how Managed Search can help your team build, deliver and optimize image, video and audio search.

Start Now for Free

Try Managed Search for 14 days and see how Solr can help search image, video, audio and other content sources.

By Kevin Montgomery

Product Marketing Engineer

Managed Search is a flexible scalable search platform that can support customized search experiences regardless of content type.

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