New Software Tech "Understands" Your Photos

Scientists at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT and the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications HHI are working on a system that automatically categorizes photographs. Called aceMedia, the system looks at and "UNDERSTANDS" elements in photographs, then indexes and tags them accordingly when they're saved to disk. It knows if the picture was taken indoors or outside, for example, or whether it was snapped at the beach or in a city. The piece de resistance is that it recognizes faces. If you tell it that a person is, say, Janet, then future pictures of Janet are given the "Janet" tag automatically. The tagging metadata is then saved with the picture. A related system for Windows Mobile devices, called the Pocket-PC Photobrowser, lets you do the same thing on a phone.

Fraunhofer research like this always wows everyone at CeBIT each year, but does any of it ever make it into real products you can buy?