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

Not a threat to either company.

[Godeke]

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.

To my knowledge Google only uses textual metadata

[foniksonik]

I believe Google just uses surrounding textual metadata from the web page to identify a likely candidate image... combined with a false positive approach where an image named or labeled money.gif on a page with 50% content about puppies.. probably the image isn't a puppy, while all other large file sized images most likely are puppies...

IMatch has been doing this for years

[clausiam]

IMatch is image cataloging software that I've been using for a couple of years at least. It has builtin support for doing exactly this kind of search.

/Claus

Violence

[kenp2002]

I'm not one to suggest violence but at the rate the patent office is going we Americans might have to walk up to the front door, kick it in, and beat some F%&*#&% sense into those people.

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.