The LEVAN (Learning EVerything About ANything) is a visual processing
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
developed by
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
s from
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in
Seattle and the
University of Washington. It is capable of teaching itself about any visual concept without any human supervision during the operation. LEVAN learns which terms are relevant by analyzing the content of the images found on the Web and identifying characteristic patterns across them using recognition algorithms. The funds for the research on LEVAN was provided by the U.S.
Office of Naval Research
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is an organization within the United States Department of the Navy responsible for the science and technology programs of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Established by Congress in 1946, its mission is to plan ...
and the
National Science Foundation. It was initially rolled out in March and as of 21 June 2014, users can browse a library of about 175 concepts with it.
Operation
LEVAN works by associating the textual data with visual data. After providing it with a textual entry, the programme then searches through numerous books and images and identifies every possible variations of the concept and displays the results as a detailed list of images that have uniformity in appearance. The research team proposed two main approaches, called axes. The "everything" axis corresponds to every possible appearance variations of a concept, while the "anything" axis corresponds to the span of different concepts for which visual models are to be learned. A different algorithm is responsible for refining words that do not correspond to the visual data.
As of June 2014, the system has been working as an archive.
Future plans
In future, the developers of the program intend to release it as an open source program, and eventually offer a smartphone app, to be available for educational purposes and facilitate an information bank to assist researchers in the computer vision community. The phone app will be aimed at quick categorising and tagging of images for archiving.
The researchers will present the project in late June 2014 at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition annual conference in
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus () is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest, after Chicago, and t ...
.
References
{{Reflist
External links
Official Site
Search engine software