Los Altos, CA – June 3, 2003 – piXlogic, provider of Visual Search Engine (VSE) software, today announced In-Q-Tel, a private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, has invested in and become a customer of the company. After rigorous testing, In- Q-Tel determined piXlogic’s software can quickly and automatically index and search object information in digital images and video.
piXlogic provides the foundation for managing the contents of pictures/videos at a logical level, and for using pictures to query and interact with databases and software systems. In the short run, the piXlogic technology provides the means to bring digital images/video on par with electronic text documents from a content management perspective. In the long run, it offers the potential to revolutionize the way people use digital images to interact with computing systems.
“piXlogic’s advanced image search technology provides a great combination of speed, accuracy, and compactness,” said Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel. “In a multimedia rich age, this technology can significantly help both commercial enterprises and government organizations handle vast amounts of images and video.”
piXlogic’s software is targeted at markets that are forced to deal with the vast amounts of digital imagery being created daily. It is vital to the broadcast, advertising, entertainment and media industries as they try to maximize revenue from reuse of their properties. Further, the piXlogic capabilities are becoming increasingly important to mobile services companies as sales explode for camera-enabled phones and PDAs. The security industry also has a keen interest in visual search technology to help focus their limited resources on images and video that may contain valuable information.
“We believe the piXlogic technology can fundamentally change the way people interact with images and databases containing digital images and video,” said Joe Santucci, CEO of piXlogic. “Having In-Q-Tel select our software is a great validation of our efforts to create the first practical production-quality Visual Search Engine technology. We are excited to be working with experts who will push the envelope on requirements for visual search. This will benefit our customers in all markets.”
“Today massive amounts of digital imagery are being created and stored,” said Dr. Shelia Guberman, Senior Scientist of piXlogic and inventor of the handwriting recognition technology used today by Microsoft in Windows CE. “Until now, a user had two options for finding a particular image—manually looking through hundreds to millions of images looking for ones that match his requirements, or tagging each image with external attributes (keywords or metadata) describing the contents of the image to be searched later using a text search engine. The latter requires not only manually reviewing all images and entering those descriptions, but also ensuring that the descriptions be comprehensive enough to cover all possible words which could be the subject of future search queries.”
About piXsearch™ SDK
piXlogic’s piXsearch™ SDK (software developer kit) can easily be integrated into existing applications through its well-defined, comprehensive API and industry standard interfaces. Not only does it extract accurate logical visual object information from digital images and videos, but it stores this metadata in a very compact format. The metadata can be searched rapidly using any arbitrary image, or portion of an image to formulate an object-based visual search query. By being able to detect and match objects within images automatically, the software can drastically reduce the amount of manpower otherwise required to perform these types of tasks.
About piXlogic
PiXlogic provides Image Search Engine (ISE) software that quickly and automatically indexes and searches for object information in digital images and video. piXlogic’s software is targeted at markets forced to deal with the vast amounts of digital imagery being created daily, including media asset management, security, and mobile devices. piXlogic is a privately held software technology company headquartered in Los Altos, CA. For more information go to www.pixlogic.com.
About In-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel is a private, independent, enterprise funded by the CIA. Launched in 1999, In-QTel's mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national security interests. Working from an evolving strategic blueprint that defines the CIA's critical information technology needs, In-Q-Tel engages with entrepreneurs, established companies, researchers and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that pay out in superior intelligence capabilities for the CIA and the larger Intelligence Community. Learn more at www.in-q-tel.org.
Media Contact:
Nico Sell
Montara Mountain Marketing
650-465-0943
nico@montaramountain.com
Bob McKee
piXlogic
408-655-8856
bmckee@pixlogic.com
