Hitachi Develops New Visual Search

Tech.Luver writes to tell us that Hitachi has developed a new visual search engine that can supposedly find similar images from within millions of video and picture data entries in around 1 second. "The technology assesses the similarity of images based on image characteristics presented as high-dimensional numeric information. The information is acquired by automatically detecting information regarding the images, such as color distribution and shapes."

Comments

Hmmm.... robotics?

[fyngyrz]

This is interesting to me - if it performs well - because this is one of the key missing elements for robotics; robots have a lot of trouble trying to match the environment around them to stored records of objects unless the environment is severely constrained. I'm not speaking of AI here (or at least, not yet) but just robots that would be able to clean your floor, carry your groceries, navigate in a burning building, walk your dog, tend your lawn. If they can classify images against stored images well, we're that much closer to generally useful and at least semi-autonomous robot devices.

Training might be a little annoying the first few times, but once you had a good database, you could replicate - or share via RF, that'd be freaky... neighbor's robot learns what a ferret looks like, now yours knows too - so that newer models were more and more informed right out of the box. Crate. Coffin. Whatever.

Add an associative database so that images normally found near other images which have just been found are searched first, and perhaps you could get the general search time down from the quoted 1 second, I'm thinking. One second is kind of pokey for a lot of robotic applications. But if the thing is in a kitchen, why would it need to be looking to recognize images that are found in a shipyard?

And I, for one, would welcome our semi-autonomous, environment recognizing, floor cleaning robot underlings.