CLIPSE -- a minimalistic CLIP-based image search engine for research

A brief overview of CLIPSE, a self-hosted image search engine with the main application of research, is provided. In general, CLIPSE uses CLIP embeddings to process the images and also the text queries. The overall framework is designed with simplicity to enable easy extension and usage. Two benchmark scenarios are described and evaluated, covering indexing and querying time. It is shown that CLIPSE is capable of handling smaller datasets; for larger datasets, a distributed approach with several instances should be considered.