Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ayman Malek Abdel Hamid Kaheel

Kancheng Cao

Pragyana K Mishra

Rajeev Prasad

Avneesh Sud

Sumit Amar

Prakash Asirvatham Arul

Mohammad Adil Hafeez

Padma Priya Gaggara

Dhananjay Dilip Kulkarni

Systems, methods, and computer storage media for discovering authoritative images of people entities are provided. Selections of person entities are received. Authoritative URLs and authoritative images for the person entities are identified. Once the authoritative images are identified, features are extracted. Queries for the person entities are identified by mining search engine logs. The queries and features can be utilized to construct candidate queries to identify and retrieve candidate image URLs. Candidate features are extracted for each candidate image associated with the candidate image URLs. Training data may be utilized to train a classifier that can be run on each candidate image. Each candidate image can then be tagged with an entity ID tag. Images with the entity ID tag can be ranked higher in search engine results page than images without the entity ID tag.

Discovering authoritative images of people entities

Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for web-scale visual search capable of using a combination of visual input modalities are provided. An edgel index is created that includes shape-descriptors, including edgel-based representations, that correspond to each of a plurality of images. Each edgel-based representation includes pixels that depicts edges or boundary contours of an image and is created, at least in part, by segmenting the image into a plurality of image segments and performing a multi-phase contour detection on each segment. Upon receiving a search query having a visual query input, the visual query input is converted into shape-descriptors, including an edgel-based representation, and the shape-descriptors, including the edgel-based representation, of each of the plurality of images is compared with the shape-descriptors, including the edgel-based representation, of the visual query input to identify at least one image of the plurality of images that matches the visual query input.

Visual search using multiple visual input modalities

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Ayman Malek Abdel Hamid Kaheel