Image Search Improvement

I have posted on the general problem of categorizing and finding images. Google and GA Tech just presented a paper about new ways to improve image search, written up in general terms in the NYT. Also, here is the technical paper, presented last week in Beijing. I am reviewing now. From the NYTimes article:

" ... Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said ...