  The performance of CBIR algorithms is usually measured on an isolated
workstation. In a real-world environment the algorithms would only constitute a
minor component among the many interacting components. The Internet
dramati-cally changes many of the usual assumptions about measuring CBIR
performance. Any CBIR benchmark should be designed from a networked systems
standpoint. These benchmarks typically introduce communication overhead because
the real systems they model are distributed applications. We present our
implementation of a client/server benchmark called BIRDS-I to measure image
retrieval performance over the Internet. It has been designed with the trend
toward the use of small personalized wireless systems in mind. Web-based CBIR
implies the use of heteroge-neous image sets, imposing certain constraints on
how the images are organized and the type of performance metrics applicable.
BIRDS-I only requires controlled human intervention for the compilation of the
image collection and none for the generation of ground truth in the measurement
of retrieval accuracy. Benchmark image collections need to be evolved
incrementally toward the storage of millions of images and that scaleup can
only be achieved through the use of computer-aided compilation. Finally, our
scoring metric introduces a tightly optimized image-ranking window.
