VDMS: Efficient Big-Visual-Data Access for Machine Learning Workloads

Abstract: We introduce the Visual Data Management System (VDMS), which enables faster access to big-visual-data and adds support to visual analytics. This is achieved by searching for relevant visual data via metadata stored as a graph, and enabling faster access to visual data through new machine-friendly storage formats. VDMS differs from existing large scale photo serving, video streaming, and textual big-data management systems due to its primary focus on supporting machine learning and data analytics pipelines that use visual data (images, videos, and feature vectors), treating these as first class entities. We describe how to use VDMS via its user friendly interface and how it enables rich and efficient vision analytics through a machine learning pipeline for processing medical images. We show the improved performance of 2x in complex queries over a comparable set-up.