Automated Image Tagging

Gallery Tagging and Keywording

Image Search and management relies heavily on metatags (i.e. keywords or captions) to ensure that a gallery is quickly searchable for their users. Nobody likes to browse through thousands of images in the hope of finding the picture they want.

One of the key capabilities of Pic2Go is automated image tagging with the runners numbers – which can be done using the special Pic2Go Barcodes. This capability can be utilised independently of the full Pic2Go service to speed up image tagging workflows across a variety of photography and video applications.run-reigate-2016-10k-final

Primarily it is used for automated race number recognition – and has the designed ability to tag multiple barcodes in an image. This ability allows Pic2Go to take much busier and engaging contextual content of an event – where traditional tagging workflows would be extremely labour intensive.

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Pic2Go can automatically tag all the barcodes in this image

Barcodes are significantly more reliable than OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read race numbers. Not only can they be read when relatively small in the overall image, they do not read when the subject is unacceptably out of focus, and whilst OCR will attempt to read out of focus race numbers, it will also return false positives – which is worse than un-tagged images for your galleries quality control and search function.

Race numbers, unlike car number plates, are not uniform, standardised, flat and clean, and the best OCR techniques return a 68% accurate rate (Idan Ben-Ami et al), and also at best 32% errors. This can be improved by using timing data to limit the possible OCR outputs – if the photos are only taken at timing mats – but who wants photos limited to a specific location ? Pic2Go barcodes give photographers freedom to deliver the best images possible for a race.

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Pic2Go Barcodes have been proven to deliver accurate reads into the high 90’s% over millions of images tagged using the technology.  Often the unidentifiable barcodes have been damaged, folded, pinned, or partially obscured by earphone wires, arms and elbows, and because there are no false positives – the un-tagged images can be easily found and manually tagged or edited out as necessary.

If you have an application (not just limited to running races) or a mass participation or attended event where you think your business can benefit from fast and automated image tagging of content or subjects in the image – then get in touch to discuss as soon as possible.

Contact us for more information