A powerful new technology makes it possible to catalog and retrieve images without using verbal descriptions.
Early clients range from textile companies to law enforcement authorities.
QBIC has already been incorporated into two IBM commercial products. It is finding use in applications that range from textiles to art history to police work. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the difficulty of cataloging a database of up to 100,000 images by providing a written description of each one. With computers capable of displaying millions of colors and an effectively infinite number of shapes and textures, the task would be unenviable, if not impossible. No matter how simple the pattern and how precise you are in your description, you would have great difficulty finding a match.