ReadWriteWeb

We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.