Excalibur Technologies Corp has licensed its Visual RetrievalWare technology for searching and retrieving pictures and images (CI No 3,042) to Yahoo! Inc for intelligent image-based searching over the Internet. The Yahoo deal is the result of a partnership between Excalibur and Interpix Software Corp, which will make Excalibur’s image-based searching available as part of the Interpix Image Surfer appearing on the Yahoo! search engine. Visual RetrievalWare is based on the company’s RetreivalWare software, which enables text-based information retrieval, with full text, in-context, semantic search facilities. The Visual product enables users to search for a match or partial match of a picture or image using pattern recognition based on Excalibur’s Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing technology. The user presents a picture to the search engine, which then looks firstly for an exact match, and then the closest examples to the given image. Excalibur says the software is aimed particularly at corporate intranet users. It can be integrated with an in-house application, such as a security system, where a photograph taken by a security entry camera could be matched with the photograph on the computer file, for example, using Visual RetrievalWare (CI No 2,969). The product is now shipping both in the US and Europe. The first European taker is Belgian firm Keyware NV, which will add voice recognition software to the product to develop Internet security systems (CI No 2,969). Excalibur has also sold Visual RetreivalWare to Italian television company Rai SpA, and the Russian government.
