Google Details Innovative VisualRank Technology

(efluxmedia) -- Google is already very successful due to its PageRank technology for web pages, and now the company has taken a further step by unveiling a cutting-edge image ranking technology called VisualRank. At the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented an algorithm which manages to perform image recognition and comparison of similar images to determine a ranking which will push to the first search results those pictures which are considered most relevant to a specific search.

Currently, images are ranked by analyzing the text near the image and the image's file name. “We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google. He was joined in presenting the new technology by fellow Google expert Yushi Jing. full story