Apache alike

by Koji Sekiguchi <koji at apache dot org>

Alike is a framework for searching similar photos/images. It uses the following products:

- OpenCV : to extract visual descriptors
- Mahout : to quantize vectors of the visual descriptors (clustering)
- Lucene : indexing and searching the "visual words"

Prerequisites
-------------
As alike is written by Python, Scala and Java, these runtime environments are needed.
Ant, Ivy and sbt are needed to build alike, too.

OpenCV should be preinstalled with Python Client API. Just for reference, I did the
following procedure to install OpenCV and Python in my Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard).

$ sudo port -d selfupdate
$ sudo port -d sync
$ sudo port -f activate ncurses @5.9_1
$ sudo port install python27
$ sudo port select --set python python27
$ sudo port install py27-numpy
$ sudo port install opencv +python27

The procedure may vary depending on your machine/OS. I think that installing OpenCV+Python
is the first wall to use alike, sharing your successful procedures will be great contribution
to community!

The rest of alike dependencies, such as Mahout, Spark and Lucene, are available for download via
ivy:retrieve ant task or abt compile/package.

Solrpy is needed if you want to try the demo. Just for your reference, I did the following
to install solrpy on my Mac OS X 10.6.8.

$ sudo /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/easy_install --find-links http://pypi.python.org/pypi/solrpy/ solrpy