[Search-l] vizual searching

[EVANS, KENNETH (WOODY)]

I'm a librarian, and I've been thinking about visual searching a lot
because I get frustrated with the searches I have to settle for... If I
want a "blue" picture, I have to count on someone using the word "blue"
as a tag, subject heading in metadata, or in the filename
(blueboat.png).

I've been working on an idea I was calling "Vizibiz" -- a search engine
that would let you upload or paste images, and return results that were
visually similar.  The notion was that every pixel would be analyzed,
and metadata would be created for each pixel -- color, position in pic,
color of neighboring pixels.  Vizibiz would also search in traditional
metadata and filenames, file sizes, and other attributes (page context).

This idea never got off the ground because 1) I don't write code.  I'm
code ignorant.  2) When I started searching for open software that could
get me started doing this job, I discovered a couple of companies that
already seem to be on this track:
http://www.evisionglobal.com/tech/basic_demo.html
http://able.mulabs.com/

What if this were web-based?  And free for anyone to use?  Is there any
traction for this sort of search interface in Search Wikia?  Kind of
like a "music genome project", but automated and for visual rather than
audio elements...  

Thoughts?

-- 
Woody Evans
http://woodyevans.com/