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The Visual Search

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Does anybody have familiarity with visual search, especially in regards to Media Asset Management systems?

I just read an interesting article on this technology at webreference.com (http://www.webreference.com/new/010607.html#feature – though I’msure it will be relocated soon!) It talks a bit about general web searches, ecommerce, and stock photography, but not MAM systems.

How tried and true is this technology? Any pointers would be much appreciated!

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Interesting

In reply to The Visual Search

Regina –

I read the article and found it interesting. Apparently, there’s been some progress in this field. It seems to be a start/stop area of technology. I do hope it’s something that catches on, for the same reasons you do. Searching anykind of image assets would greatly be enhanced by this feature, especially for being able to differentiate something like a firm logo image by itself versus an image of a firm logo on a product.

As far as search engines, I seem to remember a few trying to implement a visual search, with varying degress of success. I know Altavista has a visual image search, but it’s very low-tech.

I’ll be keeping my eye out.

What about stock photos?

In reply to Interesting

I enjoyed the article, and just to let you know, altavista’s “similar” image search was discontinued. I guess it kind of sucked.

But there’s great potential. I often search stock photo sites on architectural components. If evisionglobal’s engine works like they say, I can definitely see this helping me to find what I’m looking for much more quickly. As it is, keyword searches won’t help me locate, for instance, all images containing flying buttresses or vaulted ceilings. This might fix that.

Pornography filtering?

In reply to What about stock photos?

Another big area where something like this could apply would be content filtering such as for pornography. For companies that host end-user websites, a big time sink is reviewing images to see if they follow the no-pornography guidelines. I wonderif you could use Visual Search to automatically tag images as necessary for review or simply filter them out.

Now there’s a job!

In reply to Pornography filtering?

That would be something, huh?

I’m betting also that there are plenty of fields of study where object-based search would be immediately useful. Any field that utilizes charts and graphs would benefit, where patterns need to be matched. My cousin works computational fluid dynamic models, which are graphs that show engineering stresses on equipment. That one comes to mind immediately.

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