Innovative software developed in Europe that makes it easier to organise, search and navigate collections of digital images will soon be available to media agencies, photographers and, potentially, anyone trying to keep up with photo-happy Facebook or Flickr friends.
The ImageNotion software, which is expected to go on sale next year, takes a user-friendly approach to semantic image annotation and search, a technology that links the content of photos to concepts so as to make the images understandable by computers.
Such systems have typically required end users to use a manually developed ontology – a lexicon of predefined concepts used to assign machine-readable semantic meaning to information – and then train the software to correctly annotate different images. For example, an apple would need to be defined in an ontology for fruit and then photos of apple trees could be tagged as such.
The ImageNotion system strips away much of that complexity for the end user, combining semantic annotation with a variety of other technologies, from text mining and object recognition to face detection and face identification, in order to permit many more images to be accurately annotated with little or no user intervention.
“When you mention ontologies to most people they just switch off. A photographer, an image agency employee or a web user doesn’t want and shouldn’t have to learn how the technology works, they just want to be able to use it,” explains Gabor Nagypal, who oversaw development of the ImageNotion software as technical and scientific coordinator of the EU-funded IMAGINATION project. “Because of that, our goal has been to make the technology transparent and intuitive to use,” he adds.
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