Google says progress made in automated image recognition

I think Google efforts to automate image search is admirable, but I have doubts that object recognition will produce much improvement in educational searches, even if success is demonstrated in commercial searches. It would be helpful though if search engines would enable you to specify a "thing" parameter like person, animal, plant, or building. Advanced image recognition software should be able to make these distinctions. With this capability, I should be able to get many more relevant hits when I search for "Roman emperor" and not have to sift through pictures of somebody's cat!

Another aspect of a successful image search though, at least to an education researcher, is time frame. With my passion for history, I am constantly writing about historical people, places and things but I am interested in a particular time period. Unfortunately, time dimension is not something that can be determined by image analysis. This is the reason I usually include a century reference, like "1st century BCE" in my Flickr image tags.

Speaking of Flickr, Google should also reconsider some of its own biased search parameters. For example, millions of Flickr images are carefully tagged and represent a wealth of information but few turn up in the top results of a Google search. I can only assume this is because Flickr is owned by Yahoo and either Google purposefully chooses not to search Flickr or does not make any effort to optimize its search facilities to accommodate Flickr's database requirements.

"Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images."

Lulu offers image marketing tools without Corbis hassles

I was excited to discover this week that Lulu.com now offers user storefronts for selling images - both for download and art prints (with Lulu providing the matting, framing, and shipping). Their interface is pretty intuitive and offers the ability to set individualized copyright selection (Since I offer noncommercial use for free up on Flickr, I select Creative Commons Attribution rights on Lulu to provide commercial use for a fee). It also lets me specify the attribution text, automatically informs me what print size the resolution I have uploaded will support, lets me enter a detailed description, and provides extra art print options for purchasers if I have selected that distribution option.

They also have calendar templates available and I have several ideas for calendar themes I want to design. I also took advantage of their Live Help Chat interface to help me with my first product offering. The only thing that confused me a little is that when I clicked on the Set License button on the Licensing screen after I had already input my desired price, the interface took me to another layout for me to choose from additional rights options and deleted my pricing. I have now learned to click on the Set License button first, then select my license (in my case I must go to still another screen to choose Creative Commons Attribution), then enter my pricing information and click Save and Publish.

One other thing to be sure to do is to set your remission options in your account settings. If you don't set any remission options, Lulu will donate your revenue to a charity. I think they should automatically take you to the remission set up screen the first time you publish a product but they do not. It's up to you to remember to do it. However, it's still a great service and I won't even bother with SnapVillage anymore.

Today, I noticed that Lulu has signed an agreement with Getty Images to allow LuLu creators to use licensed images from the Getty Stockbyte, Digital Vision and Photodisc collections and Lulu will automatically add the license fee to the cost of the project much like they do with the matting and framing costs.

It's a way of integrating original content with licensed content that's long been needed:

"Creators of all sorts, from companies to authors, to hobbyists, to non-profits have been looking for higher quality images to incorporate into their creations whether these are technical manuals, novels, photo books or calendars. Our partnership with Getty Images will empower creators to not only have access to this content, but to use it to make their creations more marketable." - Bob Young, Lulu.com CEO

I also noticed that you can get product specific "Buy Now from Lulu.com" buttons similar to the Amazon associate product-linked icons like this:

Terrific job, Lulu.com!!!!

SnapVillage to offer hosting services for Amateur/Semi-pro stock photography

This article caught my attention. With my image archive growing to over 12,000 images, I am accumulating quite a large resource that has some commercial value. I license my images for free use for non-profit purposes but typically retain the commercial rights. I had written to Google urging them to roll out a service within Flickr that would enable those of us that wished to engage in commercial sales to sell commercial rights with built-in links to Paypal for payment but I hadn't heard anything back from them. Maybe Microsoft/Corbis' entry into the market will nudge them in that direction. In the meantime, I set up an account on SnapVillage and as an experiment uploaded five quality images to see how things work out with them.

Recognizing the growing market for inexpensive online photographs, Corbis, the online stock photo company founded and owned by Bill Gates, plans today to introduce a Web site that allows anyone to upload photographs for sale.

Images scheduled to be available beginning today on SnapVillage.

Called SnapVillage, the site is the latest entrant into the realm of so-called microstock agencies.

Microstock sites take advantage of a phenomenon known as crowd sourcing, whereby thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers submit pictures and charge as little as $1 an image. Unlike some other microstock sites, SnapVillage will allow its contributors to set their own prices, ranging from $1 to $50 an image.

Web-based database system opens up Baltic museum collections

I see some of the museums in the Baltic states are banding together to create a public database of their collections. I wonder if they'll allow non-commerical use of the images for teaching and education, though.

More and more museums are providing online access to their collections, making it possible to visit great cultural and historic treasures from the comfort of your home or office. The key to simple use is well-structured information, data access and site architecture. The EUREKA E! 2918 ONLINE CATALOGUE project has developed a cost-effective and easily configurable database system, simplifying access to almost any type of museum collection.

This web-based approach was developed to widen and deepen cooperation between museums in the Baltic States by improving functionality and ease-of-use, enhancing research, education and training. The system is already providing Internet access to museum collections in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia for European and world citizens. The resulting open-architecture system will be marketed worldwide.