Automatic Keywording

Interestingly enough, just yesterday I was discussing image keywording with some photographer friends. For stock photographers, keywording is a four-letter word. Time consuming, very challenging, and the workflow can be frustrating and inefficient. Keywords are very useful not only in stock photography, but also for personal archives. How do you locate that digital photo of Uncle Joe with spaghetti on his face from that party 3 years ago? Unless you have it stored in a specific folder on a hard drive or CD/DVD that you can locate pretty quickly, it can be quite a task to find it again. Keywords embedded into individual photo files gives you the resource to search by those words to find image files. The problem is the time and effort it takes to create a list of relevant words describing each photo.

Well, now comes along some research out of the Pennsylvania State University to start the ball rolling to make it easier to keyword. Called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures-Real Time, a computer is trained to recognize objects and concepts in a photo and assign keywords based on that training. It's not perfect yet, and the vocabulary is limited, but it's a start.

You can try it out for yourself at www.alipr.com. You can upload a photo of your own (it becomes part of the online library, just so you know) or you can view archives of submitted photos and the associated keywords.

Here is a photo of mine I tried out. You can see the list generated is not completely accurate. The checked boxes were selected by me to let ALIPR know these were the most accurate words to describe the image. I also added words below to better describe the subject.

Click on the image to enlarge the view.