Ara's Photographs

Today, I had lunch with an old Intel coworker from my first role at Intel in the Microprocessor Research Labs. Ara Nefian developed many of the applications and functions in the Open Source Computer Vision Library as well as an amazingly accurate face recognition system while I was there and who knows how many other cool and unbelievably projects he's been working on since. He's started working on a personal project - a website that catalogs his travel photographs from around the world. That in itself is not all that exciting - image galleries are a dime a dozen these days - but his site uses pattern recognition algorithms to find photos that are related based on the images themselves. The photographs are organized in two (orthogonal) classifications - location and subject. The images can be perused on either of the two axes while a related pictures search utilizes pattern recognition to pull up other images that are similar. He's hoping that the site will help people decide where they want to travel to on vacation. By looking at photographs and deciding that you like a particular view, you can use the related pictures search to find similar photos and reveal other destinations that you might also enjoy. For example, if you like beaches, then you can find a beach that you like, click on related photos and see other beaches that share visual characteristics with the one you started with. It's like a photographic brainstorm for choosing a travel destination!

http://www.anefian.com/