Amsterdam, Netherlands - Impala automatically creates photo albums of cats, sunsets, beaches, children, and so on and organizes your photos. The app helps users sort and search their photos on their mobile phone without having to manually label each and every one of them. The app can be downloaded here at no cost.
The University of Amsterdam, from which Euvision Technologies is spun out, worked more than a decade on the software. It was extensively evaluated for over these years at the TRECVID benchmark, organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“The goal of the TRECVID has been to encourage research into making today's massive amounts of digital media searchable, but research results need to be applied,” said Paul Over, program officer of NIST. “So we are happy to see good results from the laboratory developed and made available for testing on popular platforms in the wider world.”
The technology behind Impala is based on artificial intelligence. A quick browse through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store reveals that the Impala app appears to be the first in the world that realizes this functionality on a mobile phone.
"Impala’s mobile app has no server-side component – that is, your photos aren’t stored in the cloud." writes Sarah Perez on TechCrunch, while previewing the app.
“Computer vision and machine learning applications like these demand compute power and memory," said Alberto Del Bimbo, professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Florence, Italy. "It is a challenge to get such applications to work on today's mobile devices."
Similar to e.g. speech recognition or even Google's text-based search, the results generated by the app are not always perfect. The app places photos into various albums, some more accurate than others.
For example, it works well as gathering all the “food” and “beach” photos, and can easily tell the difference between “men,” “women,” and “children,” but it may classify some beach scenes as “mountains,” and photos of dogs under “cats."
Still, the photos section in the handset of most smartphone users is usually somewhat of a mess. There are too many photos and too little time to organize them into neat folders. Doing the math for all replies to the question "How many photos do you have in your iPhone Camera Roll?" on this blog, the average number of pictures we have on our phones is more than 2,000. So even if the app makes mistakes now and then, the majority of images will be put in the right folder, helping you to find them again.
While the app aims to serve smartphone owners, Euvision Technologies’ business model is focused on automated photo moderation and forensic search.
"Native visual information retrieval such as that of Euvision's Impala will soon be mandatory functionality for any professional information management application," said Jan Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer at Zylab corporation. "Euvision created an extremely useful consumer derivative from their core technology to help consumers find relevant pictures faster and more easily."
“The app is intended to showcase the technology and inspire prospective corporate clients,” stated Euvision’s CCO Jan Willem Klerkx. “We’ve learned that these clients sometimes find it difficult to imagine what new benefits can be reaped using Impala.”
About Euvision Technologies
This app was developed by Euvision Technologies. The company is a spin-off from the University of Amsterdam and specializes in automated photo moderation and forensic search. Euvision Technologies was founded in 2010 and employs 8 PhDs. The company is bootstrapped, never requiring venture capital funding.
"We are happy to see good results from the laboratory developed and made available for testing on popular platforms in the wider world."
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