Nov. 9, 2006 — A computer able to label digital images in real time, as they are
uploaded to the Internet, could greatly improve a photographer's
ability to share, organize and retrieve images.
And while the initial market may be the digital camera consumer, others could benefit, too, including museum and gallery curators and
scientists needing to organize everything from satellite to pathology
images.
The software is called ALIPR (for Automatic Linguistic Indexing of
Pictures—Real Time), and it was developed by James Wang and Jia Li,
associate professors at Pennsylvania State University in
University Park.
Wang and Li knew what anyone knows who used an online search engine to scout for an image: The results are often ranked according to the file name,
for example "sunset.jpg."
However, the name of a photo doesn't always provide information
about the content. "Sunset.jpg" could be an ordinary dusk vista, or it could be a picture taken on New Year's Eve of
the sunset over the snowcapped peak of Mount Washington, with your
friend Mary standing in the foreground.
Photo management software does allow users to annotate images with
text labels, known as tags, which describe the image
in more detail. So for "sunset.jpg," a person might attach words such
as "Mount Washington," "winter," "Mary," and "New Year's Eve."
Tags allow the user to later search for all images of "Mount Washington," or "Mary."
But labeling each image is a tedious, time-consuming process that only
the most dedicated digital photographers bother with.
"Nobody wakes up saying. 'Today I'm going to annotate all of my
images. It's gonna be great,'" joked Mor Naaman, team lead for the
Media in Context group at Yahoo! Research Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif.
But as photo management software and file sharing Web sites such as
Flickr.com, which allows people to upload and vote on images, become
more popular, the need for annotation grows.
"We see on sites like Flickr that there is a big community that
revolves around those tags," said Naaman. "Flickr brings out the social and artistic
aspects of photography. The photos gets viewed and commented on and
float to the top of popularity."
His team is working on a prototype called Zonetag, which uses GPS and cell phone
tower data to annotate cell phone images based on location.
