Putting Pictures Into Words
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Image by Ed Yourdon via Flickr
Visual images can contain a wealth of information, but they are difficult to catalogue in a searchable way. European researchers are generating and combining scraps of information to create a searchable picture.
Digital images can open our eyes to the most extraordinary detail and beauty. But there is one major drawback. The information in an image is purely visual. It tells us nothing about when or where the image was taken. It tells us nothing about the people in the image. We do all that interpretation ourselves. That makes cataloguing and searching for particular images difficult – whether you work for an art gallery or you are updating your family album.
Scientists on a major European research project called aceMedia have taken important steps towards a solution to this problem. They are building an information layer into digital image files. Their vision is that image files will come with content information, metadata (background information for use on the internet) and an intelligence layer that automatically generates word-searchable data about the image.
An extra ‘information layer’, that adds both automatically generated and manually generated information to images, would revolutionise image searching on the internet as well as on your home computer or mobile phone. The technologies developed in the EU-funded aceMedia project have sparked interest from a range of commercial companies, looking to exploit the ideas in a host of directions.
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