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"

Comments

Why not use GPS Technology?

[xmas2003]

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.

Re:Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?

[Rei]

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.