Photo-to-Search: Using Camera Phones to Inquire of the Surrounding World

With the pervasive use of camera phones, the embedded camera has been considered as a promising HCI manner for mobiles. With necessary technologies, it is possible to become a powerful tool to acquire the information in daily life. We have designed and implemented a system named Photo-to-Search to carry out queries from camera phones simply by taking some photos of interested objects. The captured pictures are compared with a large amount of Web images to select the ones which contain the same prominent object. Consequently, the related information is extracted from the Web pages where the matched images locate. In our demo, data of large buildings, storefronts and products are collected and these kinds of queries are specifically demonstrated to show the efficiency and the effectiveness of our system.