For most of its life, Excalibur Technologies Corp, San Diego has been much better at coming up with brilliant technologies than it has been at making money from them, but Excalibur is hoping that its latest variant on its core pattern recognition tricks will change its fortunes. It sounds as if the company is borrowing from Microsoft Corp the fashionable tag Visual when it calls the software Visual RetrievalWare, but in contrast to the Microsoft usage, the name describes exactly what the software does. Excalibur reckons that it is the first commercial software system able to index and retrieve multiple types of content based on its native digital patterns, which means that you could seach a database to find a picture of a person that looked like Cary Grant or Pamela Anderson without having to describe them first. It can be used to search information repositories containing not only facial images, but photographs, video and other digital media. The Visual RetrievalWare software developer’s kit is aimed at companies building strategic systems for commercial and government customers, including information services, and information management over corporate intranets, and Excalibur says it has been beta tested by graphics workstation, relational database, applications software developer and other organizations. The company reckons Visual RetrievalWare can be used for anything from positive identification for security and law enforcement through video and photo archive management to quality control of manufactured products. Informix Corp plans to ship Visual RetrievalWare with every copy of the Inform ix-Universal Server. It supports Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc and Digital Equipment Corp Unix systems, Windows NT and Windows95. The Visual RetrievalWare kit components include color, shape and texture feature extractors, feature vector indexing and retrieval, image processing library, C libraries and header files, a Visual C++ class library, a Tel/Tk interpreter, sample scripts and programs with source code, and reference documentation in HyperText Mark-up Language. General availability, including pricing information, will be given in September. Separately, Excalibur announced it is expanding its European operations to meet growing market demand. It has established Excalibur Technologies NV as a joint venture with Belgians PCS NV and Flanders Language Valley Fund CVA. The company will establish offices in Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Italy, from where it will serve those markets and Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Sw itzerland and Luxembourg. Excalibur Technologies International Ltd is in Berkshire,UK with offices in Marseilles. It has licensed Visual RetrievalWare to Keyware Technologies NV of Ypres, Belgium. Keyware, backed by the Flanders Language Valley Fund and the CompuVision Group, will develop secure electronic transaction applications for the Internet.
