Mountain View (CA) - Google has updated its image search engine by adding new filters to restrict results to specific categories.

The most ambitious new filter is one that will only bring up results of images where someone's face is shown.  For example, a face image search for Paris will weed out any Eiffel Tower images and just show essentially a montage of Paris Hilton.

This comes as the first major project for Google that makes use of its acquisition of Neven Vision, a technology firm specializing in "object recognition".  The search engine giant acquired Neven Vision in August of last year.

Another new filter option is to only show images that are linked to news stories.  This basically restricts the results to professional images and file photos.

According to the Google-centric blog Blogoscope, the update came side by side with Google's new translation service.  There is no official search option for the new filters, but users can add &imgtype=face to the end of any search result URL to restrict the results to "face" images, or do the same with the tag &imgtype=news to get results tied to news websites.

An extended version of this feature

May 29, 2007 16:16     

Hi, we have now been working for a while on a prototype, proof-of-concept image search engine called Behold that combines visual concept analysis with traditional text search. http://www.beholdsearch.com It currently indexes over 1 million images from university websites (obviously much smaller scale than Google). So far it handles 57 visual concepts which can be helpful when extracted html metadata is poor. It can do what this article says, i.e. restrict search results obtained through traditional search by the probability of the image containing a particular visual concept. This feature is available here for you to try: http://go.beholdsearch.com/searchc.jsp More about this feature on this blog post: http://beholdsearch.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-feature.html

Alexei Yavlinsky report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Why should paris get special treatment?? It agrivat...

Jun 08, 2007 21:22     

Why should paris get special treatment?? It agrivates everyone. Me, being a middle class citizen whould also have "medical conditions" if sentenced to prison. Keep her there. The decision was made by a JUDGE. Dont over rule him because you have money. Are we waiting for one of these "clebrities" to kill a child, huband, mother, wife, dad, CHILD and so on......and then make a stement. This is the wrong message to send to kids, teens, adults, anyone who likes to go and have a good time......they take precautions, cab, sober friend...come on. Too bad it is Paris, but it has to be someone before the "someone" is put in the ground. Take that to the Sherif who let her out, the Judge (who is doing the right thing)Paris' parents, anyone who thinks she should have that 'special treatment" Justice - its america, prove it!

Andrea report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0