IBM and MAGNIFI Announce Licensing Agreement

CUPERTINO, Calif. (November 5, 1997)--IBM and Magnifi today announced an agreement enabling Magnifi to use patented, award-winning Query By Image Content (QBIC)TM software developed by IBM Research in its products.

With QBIC, users of Magnifi's knowledge retrieval software will have the added capability to search large visual databases by qualities such as color, layout and texture. Rather than be limited by subjective queries based solely on key words, QBIC augments key word searches and produces graphical matches by finding images or videos with similar visual properties as the source image, ranked according to mathematical measures.

"Our customers in the media, publishing, and enterprise segments are looking for maximum power and ease of use when searching through large databases of rich visual information. Combining Magnifi's products with IBM's content retrieval technology meets that objective," said Magnifi Chairman and CTO Eric Hoffert.

"As more digital images and videos become accessible on the Internet and corporate Intranets, the ability to search by image content is increasingly important," said Dr. Dragutin Petkovic, manager of IBM's Visual Media Management department at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose. "Right now, large image databases can be difficult to search using only text-based key words. Because QBIC works with mathematical descriptions of images, rather than key words which are often subjective, even traditional roadblocks such as foreign languages do not present a problem. When combined with text-based search engines, QBIC adds a new dimension to visual searching."

Since a sizeable portion of the digital information on the CNN Interactive Web site is composed of video clips and visual images, CNN is among the first of Magnifi's customers testing the QBIC technology to search its image and video libraries. "We need powerful technology that will enable us to catalogue and find visual information quickly and accurately," said Sardy Bernard, Director of Special Projects Development. "This feature can benefit both consumers of our leading news Web site as well as our editorial staff in the process of content creation. Our high traffic Web site can be produced more quickly,and become even more useful to visitors, by making it easy to search digital images and video clips by image content and relevant keywords."

IBM and Magnifi expect areas such as print media production, broadcast video and film editing, stock photo archiving, business graphics, and web site creation to be among the first to benefit from QBIC technology. The first Magnifi products incorporating QBIC functionality are expected to be introduced in the first quarter of 1998.

About Magnifi

About IBM