Microsoft researchers have come up with a research project which allows a search engine to use a picture (instead of a word) as the search term in a mobile device.
The idea is that a search database with specially tagged images needs to be created, and then once the tagging meets a match, it can take the searcher to the image web page. The system is internally known as Lincoln at Microsoft and was revealed this week by Technology Review.
The publication cited researcher Larry Zitnick, saying that phones equipped with the software could access online movie reviews by snapping pictures of movie posters or DVD covers and also get product information from pictures of advertisements in magazines or on buses.
Apparently at present it is no good for a generalized search (so you can’t take a snap of a passing stranger and put it into a web search engine to found out who he or she is) and it is far better at flat 2D picture at present, rather than 3D images.
The database Microsoft is working with contains pictures of DVD covers but Microsoft is now encouraging outside contributors to put their own pictures into the database. Lincoln can be downloaded for free using Internet Explorer, but only runs on Windows Mobile devices.
The Microsoft system creates a index signature of the picture, describing the relative position of the pixels and the intensity of a certain feature in a picture, and drops it into a tiny file. The whole process from uploading a picture to accessing a link takes about 10 seconds, Zitnick told Technology Review.