6 Die Zukunft der Suchmaschinen (S. 157-158)

6.1 Machine Vision Technology
Dr. Hartmut Neven Neven Vision, Santa Monica, CA

Guten Tag, ich bin sehr froh, einen Vortrag über die Zukunft der Internetsuche halten zu dürfen, wobei ich ehrlich sagen muss, dass wir nicht wirklich an der Zukunft der Internetsuchen ganz allgemein arbeiten. Wir konzentrieren unsere Arbeit auf das visuell suchen. Aber ich glaube, dass visuelle Suche ein ganz wichtiger Bestandteil von zukünftigen Suchmaschinen sein wird, was ich ein bisschen im Vortrag erklären möchte. Da die Folien auf Englisch sind, möchte ich den Vortrag auch auf Englisch halten.

What is Neven Vision doing? Neven Vision is doing Machine Vision. Some people also call it Image Recognition. Essentially in the context of internet search you can think of it as follows: If today you use the Google engine or Yahoo you input in a text string and you get information back about the text string. So, what we are proposing is to do the same thing but instead of sending in text you send an image and you get information about the image content back. Now we are doing this not just for any search application even though it is applicable for many search contexts, we focus mainly for mobile phones. Why? Simply because mobile phones tend to have a camera and even more camera phones will be out there in the near future.

Here I have a little bit of the basic statistics (Fig. 1). I think most of you are very familiar with this phenomenon. Basically we are staring at a phenomenon where in a few years about a billion camera phones will be in the market. Today it is about 350 Million camera phones. To say it a little bit harshly this means that every human being of economic relevance will have a camera phone in the pocket. For someone working in image recognition this is a beautiful situation. You have something like a small PC with an attached camera and internet connection. This is a perfect context. A huge infrastructure investment has been made to enable visual search as an important new service. I am going to explain some sub-services that I enabled.