Briefs

Creating, storing and transmitting visual images has become increasingly easy. Yet the same problem always arises � how to categorise or classify visual images automatically without using external metadata or image thumbnails? There now may be an answer.

Researchers in the IST project LAVA (Learning for Adaptable Visual Assistants) have developed a method of automatically categorising the content of digital images, providing an effective means of storing and retrieving digital image content without having to rely on additional metadata. The developed techniques should be of real value for document and content management, making it much easier for users to search for images as well as text.

"Our main idea was to bring together researchers from the machine-learning community with those from the computer-vision and cognitive science areas," says LAVA's Gabriela Csurka of Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) in Grenoble.

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