Slashdot Mirror
Interwoven Patents Some Aspects Of Image Search
prostoalex writes "InterWoven patented locating and identifying image content via shapes, texture, color or resemblance to another image. No official word yet on whether the company thinks there are any infringers."
Google doesn't look at the image, just the filename, alt tag and surrounding context. Likewise with Ditto. I fail to see how that involves "shapes, texture, color or resemblance to another image". There are other companies out there that should be worried, but the ones you mention are about as far from that patent as you can get and still search on images.
These guys are a closer match, but since they are doing 3D CAD/CAM models, perhaps they are safe to.
On the other hand... these guys (eVe Image Search Toolkit) could be in trouble if they are not the patent holders themselves.
This patent seems more applicable to finding images that have similar color properties and gross image shape, which could be really useful when looking for images that go well together when compositing, not for finding pictures of a specific thing (unless you have an example that is very similar to the object you seek.)
So for the forseeable future, metadata will be far more successfull at finding images. Computer vision is still incredibly primitive: more so than computer speech recognition ten years ago.
Sig under construction since 1998.