Hadoop Optimization for Massive Image Processing: Case Study Face Detection

Face detection applications are widely used for searching, tagging and classifying people inside very large image databases. This type of applications requires processing of relatively small sized and large number of images. On the other hand, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is originally designed for storing and processing large-size files. Huge number of small-size images causes slowdown in HDFS by increasing total initialization time of jobs, scheduling overhead of tasks and memory usage of the file system manager (Namenode). The study in this paper presents two approaches to improve small image file processing performance of HDFS. These are (1) converting the images into single large-size file by merging and (2) combining many images for a single task without merging. We also introduce novel Hadoop file formats and record generation methods (for reading image content) in order to develop these techniques.