How do you find an image or video on the Internet or YouTube without a text description? Along with his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, Dutch researcher Theo Gevers has developed software that can find objects and concepts automatically in images and video clips.

The team from the University of Amsterdam took part in three major international competitions, testing and comparing computer search engines. These competitions looked into which search methods could best detect concepts in images and video clips without text descriptions. Concepts include objects such as persons, animals, vehicles and events such as explosions, demonstrations, fire, violence etc. The team scooped first prize in all three of these competitions (with over 60 teams from both industry and academia), winning ImageCLEF, PASCAL VOC and TRECVid. The world-leading image and video search system uses advanced automatic image understanding, rapid indexing and intelligent classification techniques. Supercomputers are used to address the enormous volumes of data.

How do you look for an action scene or a pretty cat? At the moment, we use text for this. For instance, you can type in the word "cat" and a search engine will start to look for images linked to the word "cat." But if the image or film clip is not described by text, then searching against text becomes impossible. The team from University of Amsterdam has changed this by using an automatic computerised search for objects within the image itself, rather than for the text.