Macroglossa was a

visual search engine A visual search engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, ot ...

based on the comparison of images, coming from an Italian Group. The development of the project began in 2009. In April 2010 is released the first public

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

. Users can upload photos or images that they aren't sure what they are to determine what the images contain. Macroglossa compares images to return search results based on specific search categories. The engine does not use technologies and solutions such as OCR, tags, vocabulary trees. The comparison is directly based on the contents of the image which the user wants to know more. Included features are the categorization of the elements, the ability to search specific portions of the image or start a search from a video file, but the main function is to simulate a digital eye on trying to find similarities of an unknown subject. This technology allows users to pull results from collections of visual content without using tags for search. The visuals can be

crowd sourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

. In addition, Macroglosssa can also be used as a reverse image search to find

orphan works An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details ...

and possible violations of copyright of images. Macroglossa supports all popular image extensions such

jpeg JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

, png, bmp,

gif The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

and video formats such

avi Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

, mov, mp4, m4v,

3gp 3GP (3GPP file format) is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones. 3G2 (3GPP2 ...

wmv Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

, mpeg. Macroglossa enters

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

stage in September 2011 and at the same time open to the public the opportunity to use the developed

interfaces Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * Interface (journal), ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * ''Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Lin ...

( Api for web and mobile applications ) in order to expand the use of the engine in the B2B and

B2C Direct-to-consumer (DTC) or business-to-consumer (B2C) is the business model of selling products directly to customers and thereby bypassing any third-party retailers, wholesalers, or any other middlemen. Direct-to-consumer sales are usually tr ...

fields. Macroglossa becomes a

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is cons ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

are distributed on three levels : free, basic, and premium. The free API has limited use, but basic and premium do not. The premium API also offers custom services allowing customers to extend and mold the features offered by computer vision.J. R. Martínez-de Dios, C. Serna y A. Ollero.
Computer vision and robotics techniques in fish farms
, Robotica. Vo. 21. No. 3. Editor Cambridge University Press. June 2003. Discontinued as the site is dead since February 2016.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.macroglossa.com Internet search engines Multimedia Image search