CogniSign's xcavator technology to be featured at InfoTrends Conference

We've been selected to present our technology at the InfoTrends Digital Imaging Conference, to be held October 15-16, 2008 in Burlingame, CA. This conference includes three 'Hot Looks' segments, where CogniSign has been selected as one of three top companies to present to a premium industry audience of C-level corporate executives, press, and market research analysts.

InfoTrends is the leading worldwide market research firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry. Check out InfoTrends and this two day conference at:
www.Infotrends.com

xcavator.net inventory approaching 7 million images

I'm pleased to report that our site now has 6,857,169 great stock photos from leading vendors in Rights Managed and Microstock. We'll be adding several new providers in early Fall, across three categories: Rights Managed, traditional Royalty Free, and Microstock. Where would you like to see the biggest increases in inventory? Which categories and subject matter? We're committed to meeting the needs of the busy stock photo buyer with one stop shopping. Have a great summer and search safely !!!

COMP images launched at xcavator.net

Based on a large number of user requests, we have added larger comp images to the site. To check it out, just place your mouse over any image, and you will see the option to click on the COMP button to bring up a large, watermarked comp image. This larger format really helps in buying decisions, and these watermarked images can also be dragged and dropped to your desktop or to graphical applications like Powerpoint and Photoshop when creating mock ups. Check it out !

To buy a photo, click on the COMP button then the AGENCY button that appears with the comp image.

Tip: Using the Lightbox

The Lightbox at xcavator.net allows you to store images you are interested in. Those images will still be there when you come back to the site later, as long as you are using the same web browser. Additionally, the Email It function allows you to send the agency links to anyone you wish for collaboration on selecting images. You can also use Email It to send these links to your own email address!

Tip: Our DEMO link is a valuable resource

Check out our DEMO - a video introduction of how to use the search tools at xcavator.net. You will hear our CEO Bryan Calkins walking you through a few interesting examples that show how to use Image Search, Color Search, and interactive Image Search. It also gives a few examples of how keywords interact with these tools (as discussed in our last posting). Just click on the DEMO link at the top of the site and click the PLAY button.

Tip: Using keywords with a photo in the Image Search box

Keywords get you started on a search, but they can also be used to refine your search when you've added a photo to the Image Search box at the top left of the site. Here's how:

1. If you want to find more images that are pretty much EXACTLY like the photo in the Image Search box, clear all keywords and hit GO for a new search. Our search will combine the visual information and the tags from the photo and find very similar photos.

2. If you want to refine the image in a particular direction of subject matter, type a keyword in the text search box with the photo remaining in the Image Search box. For example, you could have a picture of a car in the Image Search box and could be looking at similar photos of other cars. Typing in 'sports car' in the text box will refine the search in that direction. 'Economy car' will refine it in a different direction. But in all cases the photos in the search results will have some visual similarity to the photo in the Image Search box.

3. You can also click on any of the tags associated with the photo in the Image Search box - they are presented below the text search box. This will pop them up to the text search box, and place more emphasis on this particular tag (or tags - you can use more than one).

Try it! It's fun.

The internal workings of the xcavator search technology

If you’ve already played or worked with xcavator.net, you may have become curious about how it works. Here is a brief description of its inner mechanics.

Xcavator.net provides several tools for finding the right image. You may:

1) Narrow search results with images by using keywords;

2) Select images with a certain dominant color;

3) Find images that look similar to a selected reference image, and finally;

4) Interactively choose certain parts in the reference image to make them and their spatial relationship more prominent when searching for similar images - the 'traces' function.

In our solution, all these tools are implemented with just two distinct search engines: one for keywords, dominant color and image similarity and the other for the 'traces' interactive visual search. The former one is based on so-called indexing techniques, so I call it index search, which combines visual and text information into a single data structure and produces results very quickly, regardless of the size of an image collection. The results of our indexed search are superb for this class of algorithms, and we can handle significantly larger image collections than our competitors.

The purpose of the second interactive search engine is to further tune the search results to specific user needs. Interactive search is much more accurate and specific than the index search because the user can select important image parts and skip unimportant ones. We call this 'traces' on the site because the user can pick points of interest or trace through a feature or feature using the mouse. The interactive search is applied to the results of the index search as a refinement tool, and it brings the best images to the top of the search results based on this additional user-defined search criteria.

There is a lot of interesting things to be said about the interactive search. I’ll cover this topic in one of my next posts. Meanwhile, I highly recommend watching our Video Intro to learn how to use our search engines in the most efficient manner.