Kassel, Germany (dpa) – If you’re using an image on your Web site that legally belongs to someone else, watch out. You could be the target of three young entrepreneurs from Kassel, Germany.
They’re equipped with a huge computer network and a passion for enforcing copyright laws on the millions of images that belong to companies or people – and which perhaps thousands of others are using for free on the Internet.
The computers used by the three former math students search 50 million images per day for illegally used company logos, swastikas, or photos of missing persons.
The entrepreneurs claim to have created the world’s first software for image recognition that mimics the human brain’s activity required for sight. In the future, the software will be used for analyzing moving images.
“We can find out if on a Web page dedicated to the Fiji Islands a photo of soccer players shows them wearing shirts of a specific brand,” says Joerg Lamprecht, the CEO of Cobion, the firm the young men founded.
The computer compares all images on the Internet pixel by pixel with the image that is being searched for. Images that contain objects of the desired color and shape are culled from the millions of scanned pictures.
The accuracy for this step can be set by the user. When looking for a logo, for example, the search can be configured to return symbols that resemble the logo.
“We wanted to create software that wouldn’t look for text, but for images,” says Lamprecht. So with two fellow students from Germany’s University of Kassel, Lamprecht worked on computer programs that attempted to replicate the way the human brain operates.
“We wanted to teach computers how to see,” Lamprecht says. The first program they created was used to determine whether the expiration dates on bottles had been printed in the proper location.
A similar program was used in bio-medicine to count and compare cancer cells. In 1997, the three founded their own company, which currently employs 50 people in Kassel and San Francisco, California.
Cobion’s command center – the place where employees use the company’s software to scan images – looks like a spaceship, and employees refer to it as the “bridge,” a reference to the popular Star Trek science fiction television series.
Bathed in blue light, the bridge’s countless monitors are mounted in the walls and used to configure and control the searches.
“We pay over 50,000 dollars for Internet access every month,” says the 30-year-old company founder. Fiberoptic lines connect the 500 computers to four Internet providers. New computers are being added constantly in an effort to keep up with the one million new Web sites that appear every day.
“So far, we are keeping up with the growth of the Internet,” Lamprecht says.
Cobion’s main customers are companies trying to uncover illegal use of their copyrighted logos and other intellectual property. Sports attire makers, for instance, are intent on protecting their brands, and pharmaceutical companies want to prevent the sale of forged medication over the Internet.
But Cobian’s client list is diverse. During the Olympic Games, for example, sponsors will use Cobion to search for their logos. And recently, in another scan, Cobian helped the German federal police uncover some 50,000 swastikas on the Web in an effort to locate illegal Nazi activity.
Even the White Ring, an organization sponsored by the Red Cross, has used Cobion recently – to search for images of missing children on the Web.
“This technology will make it possible to search movies for a specific actor,” says Michael Schacht, who is developing interactive television for the Bertelsmann Broadband Group in Hamburg.
Even without knowing an actor’s name, the computer could find the actor, using a photo.
