(CBIR) Content-based image retrieval software is summarized in the Northumbria
University report to to the JISC Technology Applications Programme (January
1999)
http://www.unn.ac.uk/iidr/research/cbir/report.html#Heading34
COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE SOFTWARE
IBM’s QBIC system
available commercially either in standalone form, or as part of other IBM
products such as the DB2 Digital Library. It offers retrieval by any
combination of colour, texture or shape – as well as by text keyword. An online
demonstration, together with information on how to download an evaluation copy
of the software, is available on the World-Wide Web at
http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com/.
VIR Image Engine from Virage, Inc
http://www.virage.com/market/cataloger.html.
This is available as a series of independent modules, which systems developers
can build in to their own programs. This makes it easy to extend the system by
building in new types of query interface, or additional customized modules to
process specialized collections of images such as trademarks. Alternatively,
the system is available as an add-on to existing database management systems
such as Oracle or Informix. A high-profile application of Virage technology is
AltaVista’s AV Photo Finder ( http://image.altavista.com/cgi-bin/avncgi),
allowing Web surfers to search for images by content similarity. Virage
technology has also been extended to the management of video data [Hampapur et
al, 1997]; details of their commercial Videologger product can be found on the
Web at
An on-line demonstration of the VIR Image Engine can be found at
http://www.virage.com/online/
Visual RetrievalWare by Excalibur Technologies
http://isurf.yahoo.com/
This product offers a variety of image indexing and matching techniques based
on the company’s own proprietary pattern recognition technology. It is marketed
principally as an applications development tool rather then as a standalone
retrieval package. Its best-known application is probably the Yahoo! Image
Surfer, allowing content-based retrieval of images from the World-wide Web.
Further information on Visual RetrievalWare can be found at
http://www.excalib.com/. Excalibur’s product range also includes the video data
management system Screening Room (
http://www.excalib.com/products/video/screen.html).
EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE
MIT's Photobook
http://whitechapel.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/photobook/
Photobook is a tool for performing queries on image databases based on image
content. It works by comparing features associated with images, not the images
themselves. These features are in turn the parameter values of particular
models fitted to each image. These models are commonly color, texture, and
shape, though Photobook will work with features from any model. Features are
compared using one out of a library of matching algorithms that Photobook
provides.
Photobook runs under the UNIX/Linux operating system and is available for free
by FTP (ftp://whitechapel.media.mit.edu/pub/photobook/)
UC Berkeley's Cypress (formerly known as Chabot)
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/cypress.html
provides a combination of text-based and colour-based access to a collection of
digitized photographs and is incorporated within the Berkeley Digital Library
project
UC Berkeley's Blobworld software
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/photos/blobworld/
incorporating sophisticated colour region searching facilities
Columbia University (NY) VisualSEEk
http://disney.ctr.columbia.edu/WebSEEk/
Aims to facilitate image searching on the Web. It offers searching by image
region colour, shape and spatial location, as well as by keyword. Colour
histograms are also computed from each image.
University of Illinois' MARS project
http://jadzia.ifp.uiuc.edu:8001/
The system characterizes each object within an image by a variety of features,
and uses a range of different similarity measures to compare query and stored
objects. User feedback is then used to adjust feature weights, and if necessary
to invoke different similarity measures.
(France) INRIA's Surfimage system
http://www-syntim.inria.fr/htbin/syntim/surfimage/surfimage.cgi
uses multiple types of image feature which can be combined in different ways,
and offering sophisticated relevance feedback facilities
UC Santa Barbara's Netra system
http://vivaldi.ece.ucsb.edu/Netra
uses colour texture, shape and spatial location information to provide region-
based searching based on local image properties
University of Massachussetts' Synapse
http://cowarie.cs.umass.edu/~demo/
uses whole image matching by curvature and phase information or by jpeg energy.
Carnegie Mellon University's Informedia
http://informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
Its overall aims are to allow full content search and retrieval of video by
integrating speech and image processing. It identifies video scenes (not just
shots) from analysis of colour histograms, motion vectors, speech and audio
soundtracks, and then automatically indexes these ‘video paragraphs’ according
to significant words detected from the soundtrack, text from images and
captions, and objects detected within the video clips. The Mediakey Digital
Video Library System from Islip Media, Inc, a commercially-available system
based on Informedia technology, is at http://www.islip.com/fprod.htm.
Since the list dates from 1999, more software is certainly available. Many of
them are geared towards advanced computer users such as the following:
Visionics Corporation - Face Recognition technology
http://www.visionics.com/faceit/software/idsdks.html
IDENTIFICATION SDK The FaceIt® Identification Software Developer’s Kit (SDK)
contains face finding and face recognition technology designed for use in one
to many searches.
Contains high level ActiveX objects for face finding, face recognition, and
multimedia (video and static image) control. Search speeds of up to 60 million
records per minute can be obtained with this SDK.
Viisage's FaceExplorer™ products
http://www.viisage.com/facexplore.htm
Meet the challenges for large image database research. [...] Viisage
Technology’s FaceTOOLS™ is the complete software developer’s kit (SDK) to meet
all Windows based face recognition development needs. FaceTOOLS encapsulates
the complete Viisage face Recognition Engine and all the supporting technology
required for the development of customized end-to-end face recognition systems
and products. This toolkit is implemented in a series of Windows COM and
ActiveX components.
Matrox (video)
http://www.matrox.com/imaging/products/
* MIL-Lite (version 7.0)
complete and easy-to-use programming library for image capture, display, and
archiving. supports TIF, BMP, AVI, and raw file formats. Available as DLL and
OCX for Microsoft® Windows® 98, Windows® Me, Windows NT® 4.0, and Windows® 2000¹
Also try searching under the terms "image face object recognition software" |
