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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"
While this looks pretty cool, I'm confused by the examples provided in the writeup - "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" since GPS technology would probably be a better enabler for those specific applications.
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Maybe this can be used for robots to recognise stuff or something like that.
this is just a bunch of money trolling by someone
there's no way these matches would actually be useful -- it's way too complex -- most places look just like other places, even in the same city.
this reminds me of the article recently were they were looking for funding for super-pens and super-paper. you can draw a picture of a calculator, and then actually use the buttons and do math. yeah, right... can I draw an oscilloscope and look at RF signals?
can I draw a microscope and use that?
it's all just flashy snake oil looking for funding, just like this photo search
Also, there's the whole "vaporware" issue. The scale of this programming task is staggering; it's not only image recognition, but image *searching*. Just look at how poor OCR does with handwriting (and sometimes even pre-printed text). Generalized image recognition is orders of magnitude harder than recognizing a small set of print characters lined up in nice rows and clustered into words, and image searching is beyond that.
He can claim he's developing whatever he wants, but I'll believe it when I see it. It reminds me too much of how many AI researchers in the 60s were convinced that by the 90s computers would regularly converse with humans and be able to reason like them.
We're practicing our labials.
Actually, I think I read once (might have even been on /.) about another potential application for a similar technology, which seemed much more useful than this. The idea involved using images to search, say, a parts database. If you were holding some unidentified doohickey in your hand, and you needed to know what it was so you could find a replacement, you could sketch a rough outline of the object, and the sketch would be used to search through the design information in the database (say, CAD drawings and whatnot). Limited application, sure, but it's a more immediately realistic goal than full photographic image recognition. (Especially when, as you point out, the human processing is more practical in those sorts of situations.)