Microsoft use cameraphone images to search the web
Found a new product in a shop that you want to find more info about? If Microsoft's new research bears fruit, simply take a picture of it with your cameraphone, submit it to Microsoft's search engine, and all the details you could possibly want will be sent to your mobile phone. Microsoft's new technology runs pattern matching algorithms on the image you send it to recognize the product. Once recognized, it runs a standard search on MSN, and sends back a list of results on that product.
Called Photo2Search, the work is still in the research phase at the moment, but the aim is to make a pure image act as the search query, with no text input from the user whatsoever. Want details of a restaurant? Take a picture of it, and use the image as the query. Want to find out the best price for the latest mobile phone you've got your eye on? Take a picture of it, and see the best prices returned to you from MSN.
This technology is stilll a couple of years from production, but it wasn't so long back that reliable information retrieval from a system the size of the web was seen as a pipe dream. Then along came Google. Brace yourself for this technology, because in less than five years, it'll be with us. Glorious!
[Source: Microsoft Research]
