How did I find the photo of the Labrador puppy to the left? I tried out the new Google Lab project called Google Swirl.

What are Google Labs? Believe it or not, they are are not pet dogs of Google employees. Google Labs is a website demonstrating new Google projects “that aren’t quite ready for prime time”. It serves as a testing ground for new services being developed. Gmail and Google Calendar were once Google Lab projects.

Google Swirl is another Google Lab project for searching images. It builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface. For example, if you search on Image Swirl for labrador, you’ll see 12 image thumbnails including labs on white backgrounds, yellow labs, lab puppies, etc.

Once you find the group of images you’re interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will “swirl” into view. For example, here’s what you’ll see if you click the image the dog illustration:

You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Apparently the image search result clusters will be dependent on the image metadata. With billions of users uploading images to the web without any description or metadata, getting desired images would still require some effort. As image analysis technology advances, the image search engine will rely more on the graphical recognition of image than the metadata attached to the same.

This entry was posted by Greg on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Lab Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: dogs, Google, photography, web