Videos, Images and music: the search engine of the future is European

A team of European researchers is developing PHAROS, a new search engine with highly innovative features.

If you are at a shopping centre and you hear a piece of music you like, today you can only record it and then ask someone for the title. Within a few years, you will have the possibility to send the music you recorded to a search engine, and have the title and recommendation of other songs you may like in reply. A team of European researchers, led by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, has no doubts about it and already gave a name to such an innovative search engine: PHAROS

The project, funded by the European Commission, involves some major industrial and academic players such as France Telecom, Fast and Politecnico di Milano. The objective, as they say at the Politecnico di Milano, is to “bring together the highest competencies of the old continent in the fields of search engines, multimedia data processing and user interfaces to create the search engine of the future”. A multimedia search engine, i.e. capable of not only performing searches on textual documents, but also on audio, video, and image files.

The researchers working on the project believe that PHAROS will indeed be revolutionary. “The technology” – the experts at Politecnico di Milano say – “will let internet users perform searches of new kinds, such as searching within newscasts for all cuts where a particular subject is being addressed. And not only. It will be possible to search within a video collection for all locations similar to the one represented in a picture taken with one’s own portable device”

The features will be manifold. PHAROS has being designed to be extremely open. According to the experts, it will be possible to “plug in any multimedia data analysis algorithm, such as an algorithm which recognises who’s speaking or which searches buildings within video files. This way the system will be capable of harnessing a vast amount of possibilities to perform searches that have never been attempted before”

PHAROS, the developers say, will have typical 2.0 features. “It combines the most strictly technological innovations with a social approach to searching: the ability, i.e., to personalise the responses to queries and the user interface on the basis of the users’ behaviour and more generally on the basis of the overall users community interactions”

Text translated from La Repubblica

Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in June

Breakthrough Visual Search Engine for Mobile Phones Takes Off Big in Japan

Pasadena, CA & Tokyo, Japan - April 17, 2008 - Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan's leading mobile content provider, announced today that KDDI Corporation is including the "ER Search" visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 "au™" line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior "au" camera phone. This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the market for mobile visual search, which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.



The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 Billion worldwide by 2013. (Source: ABI Research)

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics' ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they're interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they'd like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.

"ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies," said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. "Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they're interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before."

"We are very pleased to be working with Bandai Networks and are excited to see the momentum building in the Japanese market," said Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. "Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass market applications, and ER Search is a great example. We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike."

Bandai Networks had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions more in a very short time, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.

About ViPR

The ViPR technology easily supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access.

ER Search's versatility rests in Evolution Robotics' breakthrough ViPR visual recognition technology. ViPR is able to learn new objects and images on the fly (such as the cover art on a music CD), without the need for any special encoding such as barcodes or watermarks. Just as significant, ViPR performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor.

For the music search application alone, Bandai Networks has over 150,000 music CD covers already indexed in their database. Other mobile marketing and mobile commerce applications include providing content and links for print ads, book covers, DVDs, product packaging, movie posters, retail displays, business signs, etc. Even animation, streaming video or images from live TV can be supported.

Text pasted from gizmodo