Lucene Image Retrieval LIRE by Mathias Lux.
From the post:
Today I gave a talk on LIRE at the ACM Multimedia conference in the open source software competition, currently taking place in Barcelona. It gave me the opportunity to present a local installation of the LIRE Solr plugin and the possibilities thereof. Find the slides of the talk at slideshare: LIRE presentation at the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2013
The Solr plugin itself is fully functional for Solr 4.4 and the source is available at https://bitbucket.org/dermotte/liresolr. There is a markdown document README.md explaining what can be done with plugin and how to actually install it. Basically it can do content based search, content based re-ranking of text searches and brings along a custom field implementation & sub linear search based on hashing.
There is a demo site as well.
See also: LIRE: open source image retrieval in Java.
If you plan on capturing video feeds from traffic cams or other sources, to link up with other data, image recognition is in your future.
You can start with a no-bid research contract or with LIRE and Lucene.
Your call.