Have you noticed that all major search engines list Web, images, and video above the keyword box in that order? And that the text search (wrongly called Web) works quite well but the image search is poor?
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Also, have you noticed that most people, if not all, reading this article carry a camera in their pocket wherever they go? All statistics suggest that digital photography has revolutionized the lifestyle of many people and that this trend will continue.
 Did you notice that though the nature of photography has changed, the problem of image search and retrieval hasn’t changed much? It’s really intriguing that research in image search and retrieval continues to use the camera obscura model and that most researchers doing experiments in this area like to test their algorithms using Corel images.
All numbers suggest that now every year Billions of photographs are taken by people and they are stored, but there is no good system to deal with photos.  There are systems like Flickr, Picasa, Ofoto, or Adobe Album that serve different aspects of the photo eco system.  These are very narrow in their scope. For example, Flickr is supposedly good for social networking using tags and Adobe Album tries to provide you an environment to save your photos on your computer so you can access and use them.  But none of these system, not even Facebook, provides you an environment in which provides  the most important functions that people need: Store, Share, Access, and Present their visual experiences.  Such a system is needed now and in fact its absence is now becoming a pain point for most people.
It will be nice if researchers could address this problem or if some companies like Microsoft could combine the research that they have in different aspects of this to develop such a system.
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Hi, i came across this blog by accident and really liked it. I will visit it every day…
Keep up with this good job!
Thanks,
John
This is completely true of the modern advances this world is taking. Im finding the amount of imagery that can be found on the internet is astonishing, but still the options of sharing and on the fly editing are still minimal, perhaps a sign that servers are the next thing which need to be worked on in order to handle the bandwicth issues?
great article, thanks
Alex,
Student of Cambridge Health School
http://www.healthysmoothies.co.uk