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."

Comments

Working Implementation?

[stromthurman]

Honestly, if this company has an implementation of this system that works reasonably well, they deserve a patent on it. Extracting shape/texture information into (I'd assume) feature vectors effectively isn't the kind of trivial "development" that a system that performs different functions depending on how long a button is held down is.

However, if all they are patenting/developing is the searching, they're douchebags. I say this because after you have the feature vectors, the next step is a Nearest Neighbor Search, and there are already a number of algorithms for determining nearest neighbors. Unless their method somehow gets around the "curse of dimensionality", or provides other major improvements, I will be unimpressed.

There's definitely prior art...

[echeslack]

... but some of the more interesting stuff happened more recently (but still awhile ago). I have recently been looking at Fast Multiresolution Image Querying as a means to find similar images for f-spot. But it sounds like this patent is very broad and generalized, and systems like those described existed long before the patent. In fact, the paper linked above describes some of those systems.