Visual Search: Connecting Newspapers, Magazines and Books to Digital Information Without Barcodes

Visual search techniques link online information to paper documents such as newspapers, magazines and posters. Users simply point their camera phone at any area on a page and take a picture. Our technology converts that picture into a link and retrieves the data it points to. This provides a “clickable paper” capability that makes paper documents as interactive as web pages and makes it possible for users to do things like “surf the newspaper.”

We have developed unique technology that converts both patches of text as well as photos and graphics to links. We will shortly deploy several iPhone apps to demonstrate the visual search capability to end-users. At the same time we will also deploy a server architecture (i.e. the Visual Search API) to allow anyone to build their own visual search system with their own content. You can follow our progress at: http://ricohinnovations.com/betalabs/visualsearch