Photo2Search: a Search Snapshot from the Year 2000 the Not-to-Distant Future
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Written By Reprise Media | April 14, 2006 | Share This
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Microsoft Research is working on technology that would allow camera phone users to make quick, useful web searches about “physical-world” objects - restaurants, movie theaters, you name it - just by snapping a photo of them. Gary Price of ResourceShelf, who gave the heads up, says we won’t be doing this “today, tomorrow, or even five years from now but it’s coming.”
The tantalizing tech is being developed by Microsoft Research Asia’s Web Search and Mining division, and it hasn’t been as easy implementing the idea as it was coming up with it. They tried using content based image retrieval (CBIR), which sorts visual data by such criteria as color, texture and shape, but “the precision of CBIR is not sufficient for practical use,” according to researcher Xing Xie. Next up: computer-vision algorithms. At first, no dice; it was too slow. But Xie and colleagues rebuilt the system over the second half of last year, and now they have something that can pore through a 6,000-image database and return matches in about three seconds.
Once perfected, Photo2Search would be as easy to use as pushing a couple of buttons, and definitely more convenient than typing out a text query on a number keypad. Users would take a photo, email or message it to a server, and get back all kinds of associated information to act on, like menus or hours of operation. In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait until the year…well, we’ll just have to wait.
Topics: Search: Image |