The Tech Report writes Hitachi is working on a new visual search technology which would allow you to look through millions of photos or videos for similar pictures in just one second:
The technology assesses the similarity of images based on image characteristics presented as high-dimensional numeric information. The information is acquired by automatically detecting information regarding the images, such as color distribution and shapes. The technology can be applied to video search as well. . . . The visual similarity search shows visual data of a search target as hundreds of dimensions of numerical line data (the visual characteristics) and assesses how similar the data (similarity) from a distance between vectors of visual characteristics, or in other words, a gap between the visual characteristics.
