MPEG Workshop on Visual Search

Background

Handheld mobile devices, such as camera phones have great potential for emerging visual search and augmented reality applications. For mobile image matching, a visual database is typically stored on a remote server and information has to be transferred between a server and a mobile device, often over a relatively slow wireless link. The quality of the user experience depends on how much information has to be transferred.

During its 92nd meeting in Dresden, Germany, the MPEG committee (formally known as ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11) has established an Ad Hoc Group to explore potential for creation of a standard for mobile image-based retrieval applications. Sending a JPEG image in such applications is often unnecessary and can be too slow. Instead, performing image analysis on the mobile device and sending the result of this analysis to the server in a compressed form can reduce the response time significantly. Related technologies have been proposed in the past under a number of different names such as "compressed image features," "image fingerprinting," or "image signatures."

We are organizing a workshop, to be held in conjunction with the 93rd MPEG meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the meeting is an exchange among companies and university labs driving the technology and the commercial deployment of visual search applications. We are planning to host a small number of invited talks reviewing the underlying technology, addressing applications and requirements a standards body should consider, and/or reporting experiences with prototypes and commercial deployments.