Program: Second year of the master of applied science program in electrical and computer engineering at Ryerson University.
Project: Generalized logo and trademark retrieval in unconstrained image and video sequence databases. 数据挖掘研究院
How it works: Phan has developed an Internet search engine that lets a user search for logos, trademarks and other images by submitting images instead of text descriptions. 数据挖掘实验室
How it's better: Say you're using a conventional image search engine such as Google. You type in your key words and hope for the right result. "But you may come across images that don't relate to your descriptions," says Phan, because Google searches by comparing the terms submitted to the images' file names and text surrounding them on the web pages as it trolls through the Internet. "So instead of typing in text, why not show an example instead?" Phan suggests.
Phan built up a database of images to test his search engine. When you submit an image, the search engine "extracts all the information on colour and texture and compares the information to the database," says Phan, then shows the best match as the result. 数据挖掘研究院
"You're not searching by key word. You're analyzing the content of the image instead," Phan explains. "So you're getting rid of the ambiguity."
Possible uses: Right now the search engine is offline, but Phan hopes to bring it to the Internet and make it available to the public. Eventually, someone walking in the park could take a photo of a bird, for example, on their camera phone and upload it to the search engine to find out the species. Or take a photo in a café of the B-list celebrity that you and your friends can't quite place and find out if he or she is in fact the star of Leprechaun 2. 数据挖掘实验室
Phan sees lots of commercial uses as well, of course. Advertising companies could search to see how effective their campaigns are by seeing how often the associated logos or images pop up on the Web. Those same companies could also track whether their trademarks are being used illegally. 数据挖掘研究院
