http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfVgH56TRkI

Let us imagine you want find something about ... Aishwaraya Rai and corresponding movies. Sorry for mentioning that pretty actress as an example, but there is always an example. Ok, get back to the issue.

Aishwaraya Rai. If you are a fluent English speaker, you spell it like 'A+i+sh+w+araya Rai' in English. However, you might also type 'Ashwaraya Rai' (see http://www.ashwaryarai.org/) or 'Aish+v+araya Rai' and the results of web search will depend on how you spell the name. Now imagine that you could miss something printing that name incorrectly. Now even more - imagine that you do not speak fluent English. Just do not speak English at all. By the way, if you did not know - more than 4 billion people (a lot of people, isn't it?) do not speak any word of English. Ok, so you do not speak English, but you want any info about Aishwaraya Rai, and in particular images or movies.

You know what? You cannot find it. All search engines track text, but in your case text does not work without language knowledge. Forget about Ms Rai.

However, if you would have an opportunity to find her by your beloved photo which is taken from Chinese magazine, things may change. You submit a photo (without any word of English), and the search engine find all resources containing other photos or videos with Ms Rai casting. Pretty simple, isn't it?

One of the key issues of all pattern recognition applications is gender recognition. Let us consider the case: you are using the very new pattern recognition and image processing application. You are a male (or female, it does not matter for this discussion, so you may take any side). You submit your photo and the system says you look like several pretty girls, together with your old photos and some of your male relatives. Very often you say: wow, it is not like in real life! The system made a wrong answer, it did not recognize me really, etc. Are you right?

The answer is quite simple: yes and no at the same time. Yes, you are, because you have rights to identify yourself with any gender. In particular, you do know that you are male, and everybody says it.This is because you have some gender characteristics including also visual appearance, behavior, lifestyle, etc. So the answer #1 is that you know your gender because you behave yourself and have social relationships rather than because you can SEE that you have particular gender. However, the situation become more complicated if consider other arguments.

Let us say you compare yourself with your mother and some unknown male persons. Who does match you better? Of course, your mother. It does not depend on gender issues. You mother looks more similar to you than any other males. You say: what about my father? I am male, so I look like my father. Just a moment: you look similar to your father AND you are male, however you might be more similar to your mother than father independently on the gender! And vice-versa, if you are female, you could resemble your father more than mother. Sorry, if it hurts you... The answer #2 is that people can be associated with relatives of different sex natures by visual appearances.

Well, next consideration come to the head when considering new gender issues of democratic society. You know that people can associate themselves with any gender and use adornments to be closer to their gender identities. Are you sure you can distinguish such ladies and gentlemen from natural (I mean - originally natural) females and males under all circumstances by their visual appearances? So the answer #3 is that people can be associated with a different gender according to the specially arranged visual appearance.

Now about dresses. You say: I should be associated with men because I wear pants and do not use make-up (really? ). OK, please remember that many people from Africa, Latin America, Australia, etc., use make-up, while some of them are hunters. They are males, aren't they? About dress: Scottish traditional wear is a kilt. I think Scottish men are really men. The answer #4 is that people are not generally associated with gender according to the dress style.

Finally, we can find so many reasons on why people can hardly associate other people's gender using all social, behavioral and visual data, because main principle is vision and point of view. Therefore main task of the software which does not have any data on gender, is finding pictures by similarity, and only then by context. Context is a difficult task for text search systems also, while for image processing technique it means even more.

Use www.picollator.com as the search system, rather than gender id system. Just for search, for digging huge multimedia resources. However, please note: we are working on context understanding as well...

Sorry for the delay I started this post. I am going to respond asap to any comments you may post here, because I am strongly interested in many opinions on how to offer best technology for multimedia search in the Internet.

Just a brief (you may skip it to avoid wasting time on such details): I have started a company Recogmission.com to make the multimedia search possible with respect to the multimedia content itself rather than textual descriptions or tags. The company is not too big at this moment (less than 30 highly experienced gentlemen and ladies), but very active and I hope it will success.

The core question we are attempting to answer is a pretty know issue: it is better to see something once, than listen to its descriptions 100 times. The Internet search is fully depends on texts at this moment. In order to find something, you have to describe it in words. Search engines take your words and just calculate how many times they can be found in some resources, and what is the popularity ratio of those resources. I bet you know about difficulties of the process of finding the information. Too many resources with words and without sense, too complicated process of putting the correct query, too much time to understand the content from the long texts on websites, etc. Another problem is how to find non-text content? The contemporary search engines give you the answer: please provide us the text description and we will find pictures (video, music) described by your words. Again. Textual description. Can you really provide a description of the picture below to identify it in the net?

The problem is that text is just the formal representation of the World. In real life you are thinking by images, patterns, continuously.

We are developing the system which recognizes multimedia content dividing it into set of objects. At this moment, we process static images at http://www.picollator.com/ . Picollator finds pictures by human faces found in them, because face is one of the most popular objects in multimedia. Finally, 90% around us is about people, isn't it? We made this quite complex pattern recognition and indexing system in order to demonstrate that words are not enough and that pictures speak by themselves.

So, please provide you comments on this topic if you found it interesting.