iMMem

Presentation:

iMMem is a new and extremely efficient image comparison technology made by EnSoft.

iMMem is NOT a textual image searcher. iMMem does NOT look for image 'content', it doesn't look for 'faces' or 'cars' or 'houses'.

iMMem search images sharing a similar aspect, it is an aspect based image search facility that compares images by matching his colors/lights distributions in the image plane.

iMMem technology is so efficient, that opens the door to tasks that have been forbiden by now to 'normal' home computers, with iMMem things like real-time video comparison is now possible.

Motivation:

Our current home computers are able to routinely do massive textual searches, we are able to locate what documents in our disks have a given word, but we are NOT able to routinely locate graphical information.

We are unable to know (till now) in a simple and fast way if the internet or tv image we are looking at in our monitors it is in our disks, or to search for a picture frame on a movie, or why not? in a whole tv series.

iMMem pretends to overcome those current limitations by developing an efficient image comparison method that aproaches in efectivity the textual search facilities, and raise to milions the number of image comparison per second we can do in our computers.

Description:

With iMMem technology we can do image searches (still image or video) in arbritrary groups of images. That is, we can search for a video fragment in a group of movies, or to search a photograf in a set of images, or videos, etc etc etc.

As his textuals cousins, the methodology involves an 'indexing' step, where graphic material is readed once, processed and the results are stored with references to the original images.

The search process has two main traits:

Robustness: A resized or streched image is always detected as very similar to the original one.

Efficiency: The technology is so fast that makes possible to compare in real time a video stream against hours of indexed video, detecting duplicates.

Expansions:

iMMem technology is being actively developed, on the theoretical side new image comparison metrics are being tested and  perfected, on the practical side new applications beyond the base 'search' capabilities are being created, for example automatic storyboad creation for video feeds.


Legal Note:
iMMem technology is © (2005-2008) of Joan Vilaseca Corbera.