Pure image search—based on the image itself, not words appended to it—is difficult. But it would be extremely valuable were it to be harnessed. Imagine yourself lost in an unfamiliar part of town. You pull out your camera phone, shoot a photo of your surroundings, send it to a database of images from your city, and, voilà, get a match that not only tells you where you’re at, but also provides a map that shows you how to get to where you’re going.
Sound too good to be true? Well, maybe. But don’t tell that to Xing Xie and Menglei Jia.
Xie and Jia work for Microsoft Research Asia, a lab known for its computer-vision acumen, and lately, they have been conducting experiments as part of a project called Photo2Search. The fruits of that research someday may revolutionize the way people interact with their surroundings.
The project uses a data set of more than a million photos of Seattle from Virtual Earth™. And the researchers have applied a novel idea to leverage the advances achieved in text search to enable people to apply familiar search concepts to images, as well.
“This project is about how to search millions of photos using a mobile phone,” says Xie, lead researcher for the Web Search & Mining group for Microsoft Research’s Beijing-based lab. “We could build an index for these photos, use the photo to find the most similar ones in the database, and have the location and other information returned to us.”
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