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While it's possible to search the Web for images, there's still no way of searching the images themselves. Google is hoping to change this through a research project that can match digital photos of certain famous landmarks with text descriptions of those landmarks (including their namesname and where they're located) without the need for a conventional search engine.

Google created its experimental landmark recognition engine by developing a list of targeted landmarks (such as the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis in Athens) and finding GPS-tagged digital photos of those locations. The researchers then "taught" the recognition engine to identify specific landmarks by clustering different images of the same landmark (taken in different lighting and from different angles, for example).

Here's how it might work in practice: You're browsing the Web and come across the image of a landmark that you don't recognize. You copy the image location and then paste that URL into Google's landmark recognition engine. If the image is a match with one of the landmark images in Google's database, the recognition engine returns a results page that includes the image as well as its name, location and possibly even a description.

The system is 80 percent accurate when it is given an image and asked to describe it, says Jay Yagnik, Google's head of computer vision research. Google is presenting this research, conducted with the help of researchers at the National University of Singapore, today at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Miami.

Image © Google

10 Comments

1. 1. joeldooris 11:18 AM 6/22/09

   Step two for creating the 'beast'... We are well on our way.

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2. 2. lostlyrics in reply to joeldooris 12:54 PM 6/22/09

   department of information retrieval - *shudder*

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3. 3. hotblack 01:04 PM 6/22/09

   Do do do, do dadoo dadoo Braaaaziiiiiiiiiiill...

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4. 4. lostlyrics 01:13 PM 6/22/09

   and who holds the bet: the google-owning
   bigots will take care that no one cAn recognize
   landmarks close to their houses in australia. :P

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5. 5. joeldooris in reply to lostlyrics 03:27 PM 6/22/09

   What's going on with Australia and google?

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6. 6. lostlyrics in reply to joeldooris 03:39 PM 6/22/09

   some privacy activists arranged a
   "google street view"-like photo car :P
   and drove around there - guess who
   called the police ...

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7. 7. Celwyne 08:51 PM 6/22/09

   Great, I hope they use it to remove the flipping spam emailers selling enlargement pills on google groups. It will cut down on a heck of a lot of junk email from China, US, Russia, UK etc etc

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8. 8. Celwyne 08:58 PM 6/22/09

   Hi lostlyrics, do you have a link to anything about this as interested to read that. If true I think it should be posted to the press as not everyone is happy with google streetview. Thanks

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9. 9. lostlyrics in reply to Celwyne 05:29 PM 6/23/09

   gone, it would have been a german link anyway, sorry,
   and I dislike confpirafy troofers too much as though I'd
   now want to spin a story from being unable to google. :D
   

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10. 10. eco-steve 11:28 AM 6/25/09

    When it can recognise a good deal it will get even more investment.

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