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Searching with Images instead of Words
johnsee writes "A computer vision researcher by the name of Hartmut Neven is developing ingenious new technology that allows the searching of a database by submitting an image, for example, off a mobile phone camera. Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history"
It does seem to have some functionality though. Let's say for example, this holiday I received a Thing(tm) as a present. I could take a picture or two of the Thing, and it may be easier to figure out what the it is.
Of course, for some reason I think it would be difficult to make Visual Google function that well... the only way I would get results for my Thing would be if someone already knew what it was, and defined it for the search engine.
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
Imagine you're a photographer. Professional or hobbyist, I don't care. You have made thousands of pictures; they all are on your hard drive.
Imagine you're lazy. (Maybe you don't have to imagine that.) You don't want to describe your photos, you don't want to label them. The only metadata associated to your photos is date and time.
Imagine you're looking for a particular photo. You know where you'va taken it, you know what is on it, you can remember the subject, the color shades, etc. You just can't remember exactly when you took that picture. How do you search for it?
Well, you quickly make a drawing in which you try to (sort of) replicate colors and shapes. And you let your computer search for "similar" graphics.
Such software exists already (for quite some time). There's a beta Free software project (GNU licenced) called imgseek . Current version: 0.8.4. I haven't tried it, I don't know how good it is. But this screenshot looks impressive.