V&A Museum puts image retrieval on display

The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum is introducing an image matching and retrieval system to allow staff to quickly search its multimedia archive.

The system, which will go live in early 2007, is being integrated into an asset management application that will hold data on 200,000 multimedia assets.

If staff members have a picture of an item they want to search for, it can be submitted into the database which will look for similar images, says photographic manager James Stevenson, who says the system will make it easier for the V&A to manage its collection.

‘When you are dealing with so many images a tool such as this allows you to match types of pictures together and then share data on them,’ he said.

The image search system, developed at Southampton University, is also being used in an Ordnance Survey map recognition application for mobile phones, and is being examined by art galleries and museums around the world. Stevenson says if the system works well, the V&A will eventually make it available to the public.

Gartner analyst Daren Siddall says the system could aid the management of large collections of multimedia assets. ‘It has the potential to cut out a lot of the manual labour,’ he said.

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Further reading

Museum ousts manual processes