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

Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?

[fembots]

Tell me, which is easier? Upload this image and try to find out where you are via this Visual Google, or enter the street name (street sign in the photo says "Queen Street") in Text Google?

The article also mentioned this thing should start small, like a movie guide, so is it easier to upload a 2K "I,Robot" billboard photo, or just enter "I,Robot" in Google on your cell phone?

As long as human input is still required (i.e. you need to submit something), I don't think this is going to be popular. However, if you have a Oakley that automatically takes photos of what you see and feeds you the location details, that'll be something.

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.

Better yet...

[punkass]

..imagine being the guy who has to photograph EVERY STREET CORNER IN THE WORLD.

Fleck's image recognition

[2advanced.net]

So when do you combine this with Fleck's nude recognition algorithms to provide a service that can identify a person by partial nude picture?

The possibilities are endless!

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:Why not use GPS Technology?

[nacturation]

Imagine you're going through photos of your latest vacation and you find one of a street corner which you snapped while on a drinking binge. Since, in your drunken stupor, you don't remember where it was, you can just submit it to find out the history of the building and perhaps discover other famous people who have similarly vomited in that vicinity.

New Query Language

[Tablizer]

Enter search criteria: (.)(.)

Re:Man on man

[2advanced.net]

"Man on man"? Man oh man, Freud would love this!

It's going to be boobs

[Nom du Keyboard]

Everyone is going to try searching on a pair of boobs to see what they get. I can set it now:

1: Take picture of current date's frontside archtecture.
2: Submit to search.
3: Reply: You can do better than that. Try her older sister.

And we have a winner...

[Momoru]

Sounds like we may have a winner for Wired's 2005-2010 Vaporware awards.

iDating

[El_Smack]

Or taking a picture of someone and finding out their history.
click
"Whoa Dude!, she's been on 4 amature Pr0n sites!"

Yes, Imagine taking a picture

[Nom du Keyboard]

Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are,

Yes, imagine that.

1: Take picture with ultra-modern all-features camera phone of building while lost in city.
2: Submit to search system.
3: Search system queries phone's built-in GPS for position information.
4: Search system sends back retrieved GPS location.
5: Customer is absolutely blown away and immediately sends back picture of self signing virtual 10-year contract at Early Adopter prices.
6: Profit!

Re:i can't wait for this!

[soricine]

Image recognition is immensely more difficult than people seem to think. And yet every few weeks someone is claiming to be just around the corner from a system that can easily identify the contents of an image.

When your brain 'recognises' what it is looking at, it is doing a lot more than just comparing two images (as in the street-corner example from the article). Your brain simply doesnt operate in terms of bitmaps.

The fact that he is basing his hyper-vaporous product on facial-recognition software should set of alarm bells. Facial-recognition in a real-world context has consistently failed to be of any use at all, although it may work fine under lab conditions.

If all the money invested so far hasn't made a computer able to successfully recognise a subset of the visual field (faces), why should I believe in a machine that is able to recognise practically anything?

Imgseek.

[Adhemar]

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.