What if instead of just taking dorky pictures of your friends you could use your camera phone as an image swab, culling visual samples of the world around you and plugging them into a global database? Every transmitted picture would then be cross referenced with the global image bank and come back with information about what you just shot. A kind of “visual Google.”
This may not be so far away. Take a look at this interview in TheFeature with computer vision researcher Hartmut Neven. Neven talks about “hyperlinking the world” through image-recognition software he has developed for handheld devices such as camera phones. If it were to actually expand to the scale Neven envisions (we’re talking billions of images), could it really work? Hard to say, but it’s quite a thought – sort of a global brain of Babel. Think of the brain as a library where information is accessed by sense (in this case vision) queries. Then make it earth-sized.
Here, in Neven’s words, is how it would work:
“You take a picture of something, send it to our servers, and we either provide you with more information or link you to the place that will. Let’s say you’re standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. You take a snapshot with your cameraphone and instantly receive an audio-visual narrative about the painting. Then you step out of the Louvre and see a cafe. Should you go in? Take a shot from the other side of the street and a restaurant guide will appear on your phone. You sit down inside, but perhaps your French is a little rusty. You take a picture of the menu and a dictionary comes up to translate. There is a huge variety of people in these kinds of situations, from stamp collectors, to people who want to check their skin melanoma, to police officers who need to identify the person in front of them.”
But the technology has some very frightening implications as well, chief among them its potential for biometric human identification through “iris scanning and skin texture analysis.” This could have some fairly sensible uses, like an added security layer for banking and credit, but we’re dreaming if we think that will be the extent of it. Already, the Los Angeles Police Department is testing facial recognition programs based on Neven’s work – a library of “digital mugshots” that can be cross referenced with newly captured images from the street. Add this to a second Patriot Act and you’ve got a pretty nasty cocktail.