The Eberly College of Science is the home of the basic biological, physical, and mathematical sciences at Penn State. We are proud to be a vibrant scientific community that has emerged as a premier center of education and research. We are proud of our students, our alumni, our staff, and our faculty. We are the Penn State Eberly College of Science and we are making a difference in the world.

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Spring 2008 Science Journal
Latest News
photo of boat on water

Credit: Penn State

ALIPR assigned the following keywords to this photo of Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida: landscape, lake, mountain, ocean, building, grass, water, ice, glacier, historical, house, rock, man-made, train, and tree.

Researchers Teach Computers to Search for Photos Based on Their Contents

8 October 2008—A pair of Penn State researchers has developed a statistical approach, called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR), that one day could make it easier to search the Internet for photographs. The public can participate in improving ALIPR's accuracy by visiting a designated Web site (http://www.alipr.com), uploading photographs, and evaluating whether the keywords that ALIPR uses to describe the photographs are appropriate.

ALIPR works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes, rather than by searching for keywords in the surrounding text, as is done with most current image-retrieval systems. The team recently received a patent for an earlier version of the approach, called ALIP, and is in the process of obtaining another patent for the more sophisticated ALIPR. They hope that eventually ALIPR can be used in industry for automatic tagging or as part of Internet search engines.

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This page was last updated on 17 October 2008

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