Picking out pictures

, a high-tech Cambridge start-up, has developed new software that it claims could help it become the Google of image searching.

Images and video make up over 70% of the digital data available on the Internet, an estimated 15 billion images, but traditional search engines can't index this information directly. Instead, they rely on text descriptions entered by hand.

Imense's key innovation is a new form of image retrieval that automatically analyses images in terms of their content without the need for human generated captions.

To test their software, the company has formed a partnership with a group of particle physicists using a massive computer Grid!

'We built a prototype of our new image analysis and search technology, but simply weren't able to test our software on sufficiently large numbers of photos. We knew we could search tens of thousands of pictures, but couldn't afford to try it on hundreds of thousands or millions of images. This made it difficult for Imense to get the investment we needed to develop a commercially viable product. That's where our partnership with the particle physics Grid came in,' explained Dr David Sinclair, one of the founders of Imense.