Google Lodges Patent For Reading Text In Images And Video

A patent application lodged by Google in July 2007 but recently made public seeks to patent a method where by robots (computers) can read and understand text in images and video. The extension of the application would be that images and video indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself, a big step forward in indexing that has not previously been available.Information Week suggests that privacy issues raised by Google Maps Street View will get more complicated as eventually YouTube videos will be indexable via the text that appears within them.I may be stating the blatantly obvious when I say that if Google has found a way to index text in static images and video this is a great leap forward in the progression of search technology. This will make every book in the Google Books database really searchable, with the next step being YouTube, Flickr (or Picasa Web) and more. The search capabilities of the future just became seriously advanced.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/04/google-lodges-patent-for-reading-text-in-images-and-video/

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205208105