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New Algorithms Improve Image Search

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where's-waldo dept.

bc90021 writes "Electrical engineers from UC San Diego are making progress on an image search engine that analyzes the images themselves. At the core of this Supervised Multiclass Labeling system is a set of simple yet powerful algorithms developed at UCSD. Once you train the system (the 'supervised' part), you can set it loose on a database of unlabeled images. The system calculates the probability that various objects it has been trained to recognize are present, and labels the images accordingly. After labeling, images can be retrieved via keyword searches. Accuracy of the UCSD system has outpaced that of other content-based image labeling and retrieval systems in the literature. One of the co-authors works at Google, where the researchers have access to image collections at the largest of scales."

4 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Probability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not if it is a Bayesian probability.

  2. Re:A military system I saw on a TV program ... by ClosedSource · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The system used neural nets. Generally you try NN's when you don't really understand the problem well enough to try a conventional approach. The problem with NN's is you really don't know what they are actually "learning".

  3. Using games to get lots of tags by lukeinusa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One complaint about this work is that it requires tagging an initial set of images that are needed to train the system. Vasconcelos' work uses the academic standard "Corel" dataset of labeled images but also uses tagged images from Flickr to train the system. Using human computation games like the ESP game for images and ListenGame www.listengame.orgfor audio, collecting data is not as tough as it once was...

  4. How Many Non-techies Think This Isn't New? by wallywam1 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It alwasy cracks me up on TV how they show a fingerprint or face recognition system searching for matches. The camera cuts to a computer that's looping away through a bunch of pictures until a match is found. Admittedly, I don't know all of the details, but obviously current systems must have some sort of indexed data points that are entered in a database and then you run queries against the database for potential matches.

    It's a little more plausible now that broadband is readily available but this has been portrayed on TV for years. Can you imagine some podunk field office connecting to an FBI database through a dialup and downloading high resolution images until they found just the right one? Then again, that would make for some good entertainment. Detective walks in..."I've got good news and bad news. The good news is we found the killer. The bad news is, he died of old age."