You cannot hide from CobionKassel 28 May 2001 Analysing over 50 million images a day, the German company Cobion, has a pretty good view of what one can see on the Internet. As Dr. Jens Thamm will explain at the SC2001 Conference in Heidelberg, next month, Cobion can not only attach general data to such a picture, but can 'look inside', telling exactly what is on it. This knowledge is offered by Cobion, for use in advanced search engines, for brand protection and for filtering services.
Cobion, a company with currently 50 employees in Kassel, Germany and San Fransisco, USA,
uses a 1000 processor Numa type of cluster, to crunch its way through the huge amount of data
they analyse each day. The goal is to create a content-based image search engine, something that does not exist on this scale. Last year, Cobion had 20 employees and a turn-over of about 1,05 million euro.
For this year, a turn-over of 1,9 euro is expected.
The images can come from the Internet - through a 32 Mbit/s link, an Intranet, or via broadcasting services.
They are processed by Cobion's Visual Intelligence Platform. This platform analyses the
images, extracts meta-data (information about the images), and handles meta-data management.
The visual content of images is searched in several ways. Of course, the information that is provided by the filename and
description are transformed into keywords. Words in the pictures themselves are extracted by means of OCR techniques. Images can also
be searched for similarities with other images. Also objects and faces can be searched.
On top of the Visual Intelligence Platform, Cobion develops its services:
Protection services are used by companies that whant to protect their brands. Because the Visual Intelligence Platform can look inside images, it can also look for places where a company logo or brand is used, or perhaps misused. Also 'look-alikes' can be spotted. Cobion provides this as a service. It is up to the companies to take any action when required. With the speed at which Cobion is searching the Internet for images, it is unlikely that you can hide from their crawler. Remember Yahoo had difficulties excluding nazi material from their search results? They now can use Cobion's services to check the images on a site for unwanted material before displaying the results. Most image search engines today look at the descriptions provided with the image. Cobion takes this one step further by analysing the pictures themselves. This is most useful for clinical applications in hospitals or physicians' practices. For diagnostic and preventive purposes, doctors need visual material of disease cases which are related to the invididual images of their patients. Cobion's Visual Intelligence Platform can substantially shorten look-ups in medical imaging databases. There is a lot of technology needed to make the Visual Intelligence Platform work fast and reliable. A number of computer vision algorithms are at the core of the system. To get the necessary speed, a parallel processing supercomputer is used. To store the data, a large global image database is applied, and for deliverance to the customers, ASP technology is used. Want to know more? Then come to Heidelberg and listen not only to the presentation of Dr. Jens Thamm, but also to the other presentations given at Europe's major Supercomputer conference. As always, Primeur/EnterTheGrid will provide you with up to date information Live! from the conference. Web sites:
Ad Emmen |
 |