ViPR Visual Search Engine For iPhone

Evolution Robotics has just posted a demo video of their new search technology, ViPR, a web-based pattern recognition engine, running on the iPhone. The app allows you to take a picture of the cover of something like a Book, DVD, or CD, email it to their ViPR server, and they email back information about the product in the photo, including a description, a Youtube link, and an iTunes Music Store link. (Video after the break.)

To summarize the process, the ViPR search functions by attaching "descriptors" to key features in the image to form a visual pattern. Several hundred of them are extracted and stored in a database. Using this, the server then performs the same process on the image you email in, and compares the results. If the results are close enough (according to a complicated calculation) to find a match, then it emails you the corresponding information.

A few more interesting facts they mention about ViPR:

• 80-100% recognition rate depending on the character of the objects to recognize
• Works for a wide range of viewing angles, lens distortion, imager noise, and lighting conditions
• Works even when a large section (up to 90%) of the pattern is occluded from the view by another object
• Can simultaneously recognize multiple objects
• Can handle databases with thousands of visual patterns without a significant increase in computational requirements (the computation scales logarithmically with the number of patterns)
• Using a 1400 MHz PC, ViPR can process 208 x 160 pixel images at approximately 14-18 frames per second

Their iPhone application is currently still in development, and they hope to have it ready for June.

[via MacRumors]