Looking for images on the internet can be a
frustrating business. Whether you want the perfect sunset over the sea or the
London skyline by night, youre dependent on people to describe the images on
their web pages. Now Imense Ltd, a high-tech Cambridge start-up, has announced
new investment to help them become the Google of image searching, using their
revolutionary technology.
To test their software, they've made an unexpected partnership with a group
of particle physicists using a massive computer Grid.
Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the Science and Technology
Facilities Council (STFC) describes how this happened "We actively encourage
the researchers we fund to consider the wider applications of the work they do.
In this case, computing problems that had to be addressed for particle physics
can also be used to solve other challenges with large amounts of data. The
Council's Knowledge Exchange Service put the two teams together and provided
modest funding to start them off - the new investment attracted by Imense
represents a ten-fold return on the initial development funds."
Images and video make up over 70% of the digital data available on the
Internet, an estimated 15 billion images, but traditional search engines can't
index this information directly, instead relying on text descriptions entered
by hand. Imense's key innovation is a new form of image retrieval that
automatically analyses images in terms of their content, without the need for
human generated captions. They have also developed a powerful query language
that lets people search for the images they need.
Dr David Sinclair, one of the founders of Imense Ltd, explains, "We built a
prototype of our new image analysis and search technology, but simply weren't
able to test our software on sufficiently large numbers of photos. We knew we
could search tens of thousands of pictures, but couldn't afford to try it on
hundreds of thousands or millions of images. This made it difficult for Imense
to get the investment we needed to develop a commercially viable product.
That's where our partnership with the particle physics Grid came in."
Spread across 17 sites, the UK particle physics Grid (GridPP) has been built
to analyse the petabytes of data expected from Europe's newest particle
accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. But its 8000 computers have also been
shared with other researchers, from geophysicists to biologists. Last year,
Sinclair attended a meeting arranged by STFC about Grid opportunities for
industry, and realized that Grid technology could be the answer to Imense's
problem. Image analysis is a naturally parallel process which fits perfectly
with the capabilities of the Grid used by STFC scientists to process data in
particle physics.
Professor Andy Parker, Director of the eScience Centre, University of
Cambridge, led the particle physics team working with Imense, "Our team helped
Imense develop their software to run on the Grid using a tool called Ganga, and
supported them as they analysed three million images. We also dealt with issues
such as security and working with Grid managers at other universities, who were
very helpful. It went very smoothly and was fascinating to see the company
start-up process in action."
Imense have now reaped the rewards of their Grid experience, with an
investment of more than £500,000 to help them bring a product or service
to market in the coming months.
Dr Sinclair says that the Grid played a major role in this, "Our work with
the Grid has let us demonstrate that our software can handle millions of
images, at a time when we were a small company and couldn't supply the
computing power needed ourselves. This in turn impressed the investors we spoke
to, and led to funding for our company." Imense plans to use the open source
Grid technologies from the particle physics domain in its commercial
product.
Alex Efimov led the brokering work for STFC's Knowledge Exchange Service and
companies wishing to know more should contact him on the number below.
Notes for Editors
|
A screenshot of a sample search.
Julia
Maddock |
Press Officer
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Tel +44 1793 442094
Imense's work with the Cambridge e-Science Centre was funded through an
STFC mini-PIPSS
award|. PIPSS is a knowledge transfer scheme that
supports the development of effective, long term collaborations between UK
Universities, research bodies and industry. Contact Alex
Efimov| at +44 (0) 1223 422405
Imense Ltd (link opens in a new window) |.
(formerly Cambridge Ontology) is a high-tech start-up company based in
Cambridge. It is focused on turning novel research on content-based image
retrieval into a commercial success. It was founded by Dr. David
Sinclair| and Dr. Chris Town.
GridPP (link opens in a new window) | is a
collaboration of twenty UK universities and research institutes, building and
operating a computing Grid for particle physics. It is funded by STFC, with
additional associated funding from HEFCE, SHEFC and the European Union.
