The online search king acquires a company that specializes in mobile visual search.
Google Inc. recently announced the acquisition of biometrics software company Neven Vision, a company that develops photo recognition software that is currently used in mobile phones, to help it improve its Picasa online photo-organizing software and likely help the online search king produce other visual search services.
Image Recognition
Adrian Graham, Google’s product manager for photo-sharing application Picasa, announced the deal in an official Google blog posting, saying that Neven Vision, a small Santa Monica-based company that specializes in object and facial recognition technology, comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo.
Neven Vision holds 15 patents related to image analysis and facial recognition. Google plans to use the technology to improve Picasa, its free photo organization application. The program will eventually be able to automatically identify individuals and places in pictures, which will make searching far easier.
"It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about," Graham wrote.
But Neven’s technology is already being used more broadly. The company sells the technology for mobile marketing purposes in an application called iScout. For example, people can use a regular camera cell phone to take a picture of a movie billboard, and then send the image to a special database that returns a film trailer, locates a theater showing the advertised movie, or let the person buy tickets to the film.
It is possible with object and facial recognition software that can match images with those scanned into an Internet-connected database. A match can trigger a range of possible results, including promotions, ring tones, pricing, maps and search results.
“Photos of advertisements become hyperlinks to branded content portals, while your camera phone can snap a picture of your face to secure verification of identity and control access to your private data,” Neven Vision says on its site.
Google would not say more about how it plans to use Neven Vision’s technology that is currently in development, including iScout, but mobile e-commerce services could be in the offing. Neven Vision also provides facial recognition scanners to government agencies.
“We do not have any specific features to show off today, but we are looking forward to having more to share with you soon,” said Graham.
Startup Riya too is building its business around similar photo recognition functionality, enabling users to upload and sort their pictures by ‘who and what’ is in them. The also recently rolled out a new search tool for scouring the Internet by color, sketch or similar image.
Neven Vision, which also has offices in Japan, Germany, and the U.K., has developed a suite of image-recognition and facial-analysis tools for mobile devices, according to the company’s Web site, which has since been shut down. The tools can be used for marketing, e-commerce, search, security and biometric verification purposes.
A spokeswoman for Neven Vision confirmed the acquisition has been finalized, but declined to provide details about the deal. Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Graham, elaborated slightly on how Neven’s "expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo" fits into the search provider’s mission.
Google recently retooled its Picasa photo management software, giving users the ability to publish albums to the Web and share them with other people, making Picasa more competitive with rival service Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo and is considered a pioneer in online photo sharing.