APRIL 19, 2010 Image-Recognition Company Finds New Market in Forensics
By NICK CLAYTON Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510004575185872090223984.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_technology In the fast-paced world of the Internet, new technologies are often launched with great fanfare only to fizzle out with a whimper. But the smart ones are able to adapt and endure. LTU, a French-American tech company that won a silver prize in the inaugural Wall Street Journal Europe Innovation Awards in 2001, has done exactly that. A decade ago, four researchers at France's technology-research body Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique developed image-recognition technology that allowed people to use not just words, but pictures from the Web or cell phone cameras to search for matches. "Back then image recognition was really seen as rocket science," said Alexandre Winter, co-founder and CEO of LTU. "The fact we got the award showed it was really a serious technology, and helped us raise our second round of venture-capital money." LTU's recognition systems look for the individual descriptors—such as texture, color and shape—that combine to make an image unique. Even if a picture has been copied, cropped, compressed or otherwise distorted, there is enough data to reveal its source. Once it has been indexed, its attributes can be matched to similar images. For early e-commerce businesses struggling to catalogue their products, LTU offered an automated solution. Along with other shopping sites, it was a natural fit for iBazar, a European auction Web site later acquired by Ebay Inc., which put clickable "find similar" buttons on its photographs. However, despite its initial success, LTU got caught up in the dot-com bust as clients folded or were acquired. The company had to look beyond e-commerce, and soon found another growth area: police investigations. Police forces pursuing child pornographers were collecting millions of images of abuse via the Internet, but had no way of finding out where they were taken—until LTU's technology allowed rapid cataloguing and comparison. In one well-known Canadian case, a suspected child pornographer had destroyed all evidence including CD-ROMs and computer hard drives before police arrived. But photographs taken of the suspect's basement and living room could be compared with the database of pictures, so providing sufficient evidence for the prosecution. The police also use LTU's software to track down stolen works of art. Often the pieces will turn up in auction houses far from where they were taken. "This might not save lives, but it does save a lot of money," says Dr. Winter. In 2005, LTU was acquired by Tokyo-listed Japanese software developer JASTEC Co., and it has continued to seek new markets. The same software used by international police forces to track down stolen paintings is available for even relatively low-budget Web sites or on mobile phones. The technology has also been used in an Apple iPhone application called "lookthatup", which allows users to snap a picture of an object then instantly find information about it. Behind the application is a search engine, much the same as Google, except the queries are based on digitized information from pictures rather than words. "Our positioning now is to provide image recognition to anybody that wants it, from small companies using our hosted service to photo agencies tracking their copyrighted material, but we still have our focus on law enforcement," Dr. Winter said. -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
