Google Inc.

Nemanja Petrovic

Hartwig Adam

Corinna Cortes

Teresa Ko

Ameesh Makadia

Troy Chinen

Sebastian Pueblas

Sergey Ioffe

Charles Joseph Rosenberg

Farhan Shamsi

Erik Murphy-Chutorian

David J Vespe

Sean O'Malley

Alexander P Kehlenbeck

Alex Kehlenbeck

Techniques for providing image search templates are provided. An image search template may be associated with an image search query to aid the user in capturing an image that will be appropriate for processing the search query. The template may be displayed as an overlay during an image capturing process to indicate an appropriate image capturing pose, range, angle, or other view characteristics that may provide more accurate search results. The template may also be used in the image search query to segment the image and identify features relevant to the search query. Images in an image database may be clustered using characteristics of the images or metadata associated with the images in order to establish groups of images from which templates may be derived. The generated templates may be provided to users to assist in capturing images to be used as search engine queries.

Providing image search templates

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for generating image search results. One of the methods includes receiving first image search results responsive to a text query, each first image search result associated with a respective first score indicating a relevance of an image represented by the first image search result to the text query. Second image search results responsive to a query image are received, each second image search result associated with a respective second score indicating a measure of similarity between an image represented by the second image search result and the query image. A set of final image search results is selected including combining first scores and second scores of the selected first image search results. The final image search results are ordered by similarity to the query image.

Visual content retrieval

A repository contains objects including facts about entities. Objects may be of known or unknown entity type. An entity type assignment engine assigns entity types to objects of unknown entity type. A feature generation module generates a set of features describing the facts included with each object in the repository. An entity type model module generates an entity type model based on the sets of features generated for a subset of objects. An entity type model module generates entity type models, such as a classifier or generative models, based on the sets of features associated with objects of known entity type. An entity type assignment module generates a value based on the sets of features associated with an object of unknown entity type and the entity type model. This value indicates whether the object of unknown entity type is of a known entity type. An object update module stores the object to which the known entity type was assigned in the repository in association with the assigned entity type.

Entity type assignment

A repository contains objects including facts about entities. Some objects might be associated with the same entity. An object merge engine identifies a set of merge candidate objects. A grouping module groups the merge candidate objects based on the values of facts included in the objects. An object comparison module compares pairs of objects in each group to identify evidence for and/or against merging the pair. Evidence for merging the pair exists if, e.g., the objects have a type in common or share an uncommon fact. Evidence against merging the pair exists if, e.g., the objects have differing singleton attributes. A graph generation module generates graphs describing the evidence for and/or against merging the pair. A merging module analyzes the graphs and merges objects associated with the same entity. The merged objects are stored in the repository.

Fact-based object merging

Growing community of inventors

Plainsboro, NJ, United States of America

Nemanja Petrovic