We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.
“Our technology examines the pixel content of images, the different shapes, the structure, the texture, the colors, the arrangements,” Winter says. “We encode that into a bit of binary code that we call the image DNA. That image DNA is sort of a mid-level description of the image. We use that data to compare images and classify them and track them. We can actually compare image DNA pretty easily.”
Like.com is the first true visual search engine, where the contents of photos are used to search and retrieve similar items.
+ Likeness Search - the ability to search by image instead of text
+ Like Detail - finds items that have a specific feature you like (such as a buckle, straps, bezel, etc)
+ Like Color - find color variants of the item you desire
+ Like Celebrity - find clothing, shoes and accessories similar to those worn by your favorite celebrities
+ Like This - the ability to upload your own photo of your favorite item and find the same or similar product
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