Google iphone app's actual image search

Out from the Google labs and into the iPhone, the Google app has this nifty feature of doing actual search of snapshots taken from the iPhone camera. Google has really done an excellent job in pushing the envelope of search technologies.

Here's how it works:
(1) The Google app has three search options: text, image, and voice. Text search is the traditional searching everyone's familiar about. Voice search uses voice recognition technology to convert sounds heard thru the microphone into searchable text. Image search, the feature that will be described here, allows for actual snapshot searching by comparing the snapshot taken to the billions of photos in the Google images repository. If the snapshot contains text, the app has a built-on OCR to convert it to editable text.




(2) In this illustration, a book on differential equations by Rainville and Bedient was used for the image search. The green, red, and blue smooth-cornered squares scan the image to match with similar images on the web.



(3) The search results are shown below. The red rectangle indicates that a book of similar cover was found: Elementary Differential Equations, which is the right book we were looking for. The green rectangle is the OCR scanning capability of the app where it was able to read the searchable text. The blue rectangle matches the image to a certain landmark, in this case, a landmark in San Francisco, which is not quite accurate.



(4) Choosing the first scanning result, Google automatically searches for the book, which can be found in Amazon.com.



I've tried this app on several images and realized that it works well in searching for logos, book front covers, movie intertitles, mobile phone images, and landmarks. Tried searching for people's faces but it didn't return good results.

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