Visual search for mobile again - will IQ Engines come through?

It’s an area of mobile that is just as fraught as voice recognition. Visual search and image recognition is one of those exciting areas that people really want to work in mobile. With a certain amount of notoriety now surrounding visual search engine GetFugu, we’ve been keeping an eye out for more hot companies working in the area. And here comes one now: IQ Engines. Pierre Garrigues, Director of Research and co-founder of the Berkley-based company, spoke about its service at Mobile 2.0

IQ Engines terms its service as a biologically inspired approach to visual search, citing the human brain as the most sophisticated visual search machine in existence. There are two aspects to the IQ Engines downloadable application:

1) PHOTO LABELING ENGINE - this part of the service pulls logos from any image, and uses them as search queries. So you can take a picture of a street sign, or upload a photo you have taken earlier - IQ Engines will pull out any logos it recognises, and offer you the chance to connect to that company, product or service on-line. It also allows for visual contextual advertising, where agencies can place advertising beside images as they appear on your screen.

2) MONETISING PHOTOS - IQ Engines claims that 2 billion photos are generated on-line daily (really? Pierre didn’t produce any evidence to back that claim up… it sounds a bit sensationalised to me) - IQ Engines connects them to an advertising marketplace by contextually identifying any products or logos that appear in them. If there aren’t any, an automatic engine (along with a human tagging option, like in Facebook) will place it in the marketplace.

IQ Engine will allow people to scan any object, from a watch to a magazine cover, and they will be automatically connected to contextual on-line information, including options for purchase, and relevant advertising.

Q&A:

“What is the likely use case? Shopping? What am I going to do with this?”

Piere responded that if you’re in a restaurant, and enjoying your bottle of wine, you probably won’t remember the name. Take a picture of it, and you get a record of the bottle of wine. Then the next day, you can apply actions to that picture via IQ Engines. IQ Engines also wants to open its API so that if a wine producer wants to make better use of visual search they can do so.

What we think?

I have to remain sceptical about services like this. While it sounds very cool, and the technology probably exists to support it, an application like this has yet to be shown to work. When a developer starts talking about the human brain as a model, suspicions arise. No computer or program in the world can approach the complexity of the old grey matter. While this technology is extremely cool, it is just too risky to trust in. In the end, I have to say that I’ll believe it when I see it.

I really do like the idea of the advertising marketplace for uploaded photos, though. The idea that an advertiser could go to somewhere like Flickr, and pay for the ability to turn a logo of theirs that happens to appear in someones photo into a clickable link/ad is very, very cool. I’m sure there would have to be some kind of remuneration for the person who own the picture copyright… but that entire area is pretty complex.