Have you ever discovered a picture of something on your computer and wondered where it came from? How about stumbling onto a drawing on the Net somewhere, but outside of any context that would let you know who drew it? Have you been frustrated that there’s no search engine like Google (which lets you type in keywords or phrases), but which would let you submit your image for scanning and then compare it against similar imagery in its database and let you know possible correlations?

This is something I’ve thought would be very useful for a while now. It wouldn’t necessarily even involve pattern recognition, but just algorithms for scanning the image in certain ways and storing the data in some kind of comparative fashion against other pictures scanned.

I just found out that this kind of thing may be coming sooner than I’d thought. There a company call piXlogic that’s working on this very sort of thing.