CogniSign Blog

News, updates and commentary on CogniSign products and the world of image recognition technology.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

How, specifically, is the CogniSign technology more "human like"?

The key features mentioned in the previous entry are an important starting point in explaining why our technology is more human like. Research has shown that when humans look at a person, object, or other image content, their attention moves from one key feature to the next. This “scanpath” (a more technical term from the cognitive fields of study focusing on human vision) can also be described as “serial attention” or the movement of visual attention from one key feature to the next in a serial manner. Research shows that serial attention is a key part of the human visual system, even in cases where no eye movement can be detected. Our technology moves from key feature to key feature, emulating the human visual cognition process, and the result is a more powerful visual search algorithm. It is similar in important ways to the human visual system, but at the same time is more suitable for computer processing.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Use of both color AND shape for visual search

In our last posting, we wrote about indexing approaches used by our competitors, and the fact that CogniSign’s technology is different because it allows the visual search process to focus on key features of a source image. The ability of our technology to consider both color and shape features is a great example of this capability. Indexing approaches used by our competitors summarize the images using numerical attributes (values). Their technology summarizes things like color pattern dispersion, textural qualities of the image (is it a few bold shapes of finely detailed?), etc. But summarizing an image means that you can’t look at key features of it very closely, or prioritize any of them in the search. Key shape features are a good example of a local feature that gets lost in indexing. The CogniSign technology allows you to look at color as a feature, and any type of geometric shape as a feature also, in any combination. This is all accomplished using the same core visual search algorithm. Needless to say, this is more human like!