Searching Multiple Collections

The following code sample assumes that you want to find similar images of a car from several media collections. In this example, we:

open two disk-based collections

search each of the collections

combine the results of the two searches

sort the combined results

// create the two MediaCollection objects and open the two collections

MediaCollection mc01 = Eve.newMediaCollection();

MediaCollection mc02 = Eve.newMediaCollection();

mc01.open( directoryPath1 );

mc02.open( directoryPath2 );

// read in a media object containing the car picture

MediaObject source = Eve.newMediaObject();

source.loadFrom ("\\images\\carpicture.jpeg.edf");

// set up a 50-50 color and region search

SearchParameters parameters = Eve.newSearchParameters();

parameters.setSearch(Eve.COLOR,true,0.5);

parameters.setSearch(Eve.REGION,true,0.5);

// perform the two searches using the same source object and parameters

SearchResults results1[] = mc01.search(source,parameters);

SearchResults results2[] = mc02.search(source,parameters);

// add the results of the two searches together

SearchResults worker = Eve.newSearchResults();

SearchResults finalResults[] = worker.append(results1,results2);

// sort the combined results by similarity

finalResults = worker.similaritySort(finalResults);

// truncate the results after the first 32 entries

// (results are sorted in descending order of similarity)

finalResults = worker.chop(finalResults,32);

At this point you have a single array with (possible) entries from each collection. To determine which collection generated a particular result, use the SearchResults.getCollectionName() method.