eVe breaks new ground in visual search by bringing automatic segmentation to the commercial world. Segmentation is the process by which an image is divided into regions, which correspond approximately to objects or parts of objects in an image. Once these object regions are identified, the four basic properties of color, texture, shape and object shading are extracted and stored in a condensed descriptor called a visual signature. Similarity comparisons are then made to the visual signatures of objects in other images.

Object Maps are the visual representation of the segmentation. Object Maps let the user see how the computer views the image so they can better understand how to optimally search and why certain search results were returned.

Below are several examples of animal images and their corresponding object maps. The first examples show images that are difficutl to distinguish clearly from their backgrounds. The second set of images yield more clearly defined object-background distinctions.

Object Maps of images with complex object-background distinctions