Image identification company PicScout is expanding its efforts to help people identify the rights holders of images they find online.
On Tuesday the company is set to add microstock site Dreamstime's more than 7 million images to its Image Exchange catalog. What this means is that users who have the company's Image Exchange Firefox add-on installed will be able to identify when one of those images (or the other 40 million or so that are in the catalog) winds up on Web sites and in places like Google's image search.
PicScout cross-references images on the Web with its Image Exchange library to find matches of photos and stock imagery that is in its catalog.
(Credit: CNET)The add-on, which was introduced in October and remains in private beta, displays a little blue "i" on top of images that are within PicScout's image catalog, and that can be linked back to the rights holder or stock image site. This includes images from Flickr, as long as they've been marked by their uploader with a Creative Commons, attribution-only and noncommercial license.
Either way the end user will see whose image it is without having to do the legwork. PicScout goes one step further to link people directly to where they can then buy it, or get in contact with the image owner to secure the rights to reuse it.
The company says it plans to expand to Internet Explorer next, but chose Firefox first since it offered cross-compatibility with both PC and Mac users. The two platforms will offer identical functionality since they'll be working off the same master index.
Along with the addition of Dreamstime, PicScout is also announcing that it has picked up Joichi Ito as one of its advisers. Among some of his other gigs, Ito sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, is the founder and CEO of venture capital firm Neoteny, and is also the CEO of Creative Commons.
Previously: PicApp offers ad-sponsored stock photos (Note: this company has since been spun out by PicScout.)
I finally got access to Polar Rose (news story), an image search site I've been looking forward to trying. This early version of the product isn't terribly compelling, though. Today, Polar Rose can pick out faces in photos. It doesn't tell you who's who, though. The idea is that Web users who have the Polar Rose browser plugin do that.
Polar Rose plugin users can ID people in pictures by clicking on the rose icon. The icon automatically pops up below the head of of every person in a picture.
On the other side of the product is a search engine for pictures of people. If you want to find a picture of someone, and that person has been tagged by users, Polar Rose will show you all the pictures that match.
Future versions of the product will actually do facial recognition, I'm told, although the company isn't disclosing when that function will go into beta. This is the holy grail of visual search, of course. Last year, Riya demoed a tool that was supposed to do what Polar Rose is still building, but Riya eventually gave up and moved into image search for commerce (it finds shoes that look alike, for example).
I hope to see Polar Rose's technology, once it is fully developed, if it's fully developed, inside a people search engine like Spock or Wink. That's where it's needed.
See also: Google image search recognizes faces and Recaptcha: The smartest way to deal with something annoying.
You can search for people that other users have tagged.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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