Penn State researchers have developed a statistical approach called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR) that one day could make it easier to search the Internet for photographs.

ALIPR works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes, rather than by searching for keywords in the surrounding text.

They started by manually tagging 60,000 photos with keywords that describe their contents, then built a statistical model to teach the computer to recognize patterns in color and texture among these photos and assign keywords to new photos that seem to contain similar images. They hope to reverse the process so that a person can use the keywords to search the Web for relevant images.

The public can participate in improving ALIPR’s accuracy by visiting http://www.alipr.com, uploading photographs, and evaluating whether the keywords that ALIPR uses to describe the photographs are appropriate.