Your way of searching the World Wide Web is bound to change sooner or later! With the speed with which technology is evolving today, you can soon expect voice-based Web search to go mainstream, gesture browsing and the likes of “mousing” with your mind. For now, you can search images and videos with your scribbles.
A new open-source system that has just been launched uses hand-drawn sketches on a tablet or interactive paper to search for matching image or video.
Although search engines such as Google and Bing make it easy to find documents or websites quickly and efficiently using search terms, the options for searching collections of multimedia objects are more limited.
Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have now developed a system known as ‘vitrivr’ that allows a search for images and videos by means of a sketch, PTI reported. The user draws a sketch of the desired object and the program delivers the images and video clips that most resemble it.
For videos, the user can even specify on the sketch in which direction an object is moving in the searched sequence.
The ‘vitrivr’ system can be used for a wide range of purposes, from discerning patterns of movement in sports videos to searching collections of digital watermarks.