Microsoft's Lincoln Uses Camera Phone And Images For Mobile Search

Recently Google acquired Neven Vision, and Mobot was acquired in what was called the "marketing wedding of the year". Since then they bought themselves back from acquirer.

Here comes Microsoft with an image recognition search engine application.

Microsoft has their own image recognition application that lets people search the Internet on their cell phones using a camera instead of a keypad.

From Technology Review Microsoft's Lincoln uses images and camera phones for search

Researchers at Microsoft have developed a software prototype called Lincoln that they hope will make Web searches easier. According to Larry Zitnick , a Microsoft researcher who works on the project, phones equipped with the software could, for example, access online movie reviews by snapping pictures of movie posters or DVD covers and get product information from pictures of advertisements in magazines or on buses.

"The main thing we want to do is connect real-world objects with the Web using pictures," says Zitnick. "[Lincoln] is a way of finding information on the Web using images instead of keywords."

Currently, the database contains pictures of DVD covers that link to movie reviews uploaded by Microsoft researchers. However, anyone can contribute his or her pictures and links to the database, and Zitnick hopes that people will fill it with pictures and links to anything from information about graffiti art to scavenger-hunt clues.

The technology is now the basis for the Google Image Labeler , which consists of a game that helps Google serve up more-accurate picture results for keyword searches.

Microsoft now has a speech recognition browser , a barcode scanning device and developing a RFID browser .