Google launches Swirl for easy image search
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 18 November 2009, 21:48 IST   |    4 Comments
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Google launches Swirl for easy image search
San Francisco: Google has launched a new tool called 'Swirl', which will help users to find images in an easier way. The tool automatically groups similar images into categories presented on results pages. "What Image Swirl does is - it automatically organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups. It's not just the face, the color, the visual features of the images; we look inside the image and ask how they relate to each other on a pixel level," said Aparna Chennapragada, Google Product Manager, to AFP. Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for similar images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images - they are the most relevant groups of images. Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries and we plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in the search box, similar to Google Suggest. "As humans, we can easily tell which images should be grouped together by looking at them. The real question is can we train computer algorithms to identify common features in images and then categorize them. It's not perfect. We may have mistakes, but we hope to improve this system as we move forward," said Google Software Engineer Yushi Jing, who has been working on Image Swirl's underlying technology. People can dabble with Image Swirl at Google Labs, and feedback will be used to improve the tool with the ultimate objective being to one day incorporate it in the California Internet giant's public search engine. "We are committed to how we look at and understand visual information and organize it for our users," said Chennapragada. "This is the holy grail of computer vision." Google launched image search in 2001 and later added a 'similar images' feature to hone-in picture hunts.

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