image search

The U.K.'s Royal Mail is offering a special stamp that can be recognized by a phone app to play unique content. The Great British Railways "intelligent stamp" has a picture of a classic steam engine. When an Android or iPhone app created by Junaio recognizes the stamp via the phone's camera, a video of Bernard Cribbins reading W.H. Auden’s poem The Night Mail plays on the phone.

According to a press release, Priceview Auctions is planning to introduce a site for purchasing new autos that will incorporate visual search technology. The press release references Google's recent acquisition of Like.com as an "example" of activity in the field of visual search and says that Priceview will "also partially [rely] on the new visual search technology."

Startup IQ Engines, developer of the oMoby image search iPhone app, announced that it is receiving additonal funding from multiple sources. In addition to US$1 million in Series A financing, IQ Engines has been awarded $119K from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for tools to assist the visually impaired, and $200K from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop 3D object representations for visual search.

According to an article in Digital Camera Review, the company ImageRights searches the web to find unauthorized use of images. There are both free and subscription based plans for use of the service. ImageRights also provides an optional program in which revenue recovered from unauthorized use of images belonging to a user of the service is split between ImageRights and the user.

Submitted by Sek Chai

Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) have developed a multimedia search engine that uses digital fingerprints to locate video and audio files. The fingerprints for video files are stored in MPEG-7 format and include information on scene change, camera movement, and image brightness. More information is available in a press release.

A new version of Google Goggles, the Android app that searches the web based on images taken with a cameraphone, now offers translations of text captured in images. According to a Google blog, Goggles can currently read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages." Google is working on increasing the number of languages that can be translated.

Submitted by Sek Chai

Google recently acquired Plink, a U.K. based startup focused on visual search for mobile devices. Plink was founded by Mark Cummins and James Philbin. It has one mobile app called PlinkArt, which uses visual recognition technology to retrieve details about works of art. More details are available in a CNet article.

Lior Ron, Google Senior Product Manager, will be presenting a talk entitled "Looking into Google Goggles" at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference on March 31, 2010 in San Jose, CA. Google Goggles is a visual search application for Android mobile phones. According to the conference program, "this talk will dive into how they [Google] made it happen and what the computer is actually seeing".

In a Google Chrome Extension mailing list titled "Chrome extension for Web Goggles", Googler Xiuduan Fang said, "We would like to have some browser extensions so that the user can drag a web image and drop it in an input box on the toolbar." Google Goggles search-by-sight tool is currently only available as an Android application for camera phones.

Shopachu is an online site that offers shoppers a shopping experience to find products using visual similarity. The site is powered by Incogna’s image search technology running on NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture for massively parallel processing using GPUs. More information is available in a NVIDIA blog.