GazoPa:Changing the way we do image search?
James’s blog post reminded me of another company from Japan that presented at TechCruch50 in September called GazoPa. GazoPa uses proprietary image analytics technology to extract information such as color and shape from images and then identifies similar pictures from a pool of about 50 million different images found around the web.
I registered and played around by uploading a few images and noticed that the image search engine is keen on color and will retrieve a bunch of photos that have similar color patterns or palettes. A picture of a white puppy on a green pasture will generate anything from birds and horses to frogs and spiders as long as there is sizable green and white within the frame of the picture.
A more complex picture with a hipster-ish looking girl looking blasé surrounded by text and images (pulled from a magazine) generated a much more random, some seemingly non-sequitur crop of photos, that ranged from a picture of Christina Aguilera, a cat, a construction site and some others. But even with that, the color tones remained within the same range of the original uploaded image. The service needs work with better identifying shapes. In addition I wish they had an added feature of identification beyond the link at the bottom of the retrieved images. Under the photo of Christina Aguilera, I’d like for it say Christian Aguilera.
Apparently a similar service was developed by AltaVista ten years ago but was abandoned shortly. GazoPa hopes for better chances of success due to the ubiquitiy of digital and phone cameras these days and its large database.
With widespread use, I wouldn’t go so far as say that it would render keywords and tags used for image search obsolete but it would definitely be an additional method we can use when we go about searching for images.