CIA's Private Venture Fund Becomes Investor and Customer of New Visual Search Engine

June 3, 2003

Los Altos, CA -- piXlogic,  provider of Visual Search Engine (VSE) software, today announced In-Q-Tel, a  private venture group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, has invested  in and become a customer of the company. After rigorous testing, In-Q-Tel determined piXlogic's software can  quickly and automatically index and search object information in digital images  and video.

piXlogic  provides the foundation for managing the contents of pictures/videos at a logical level, and for using pictures to query and interact with databases and  software systems. In the short run, the piXlogic technology provides the means to bring digital images/video on par with electronic text documents from a content management perspective. In the long run, it offers the potential to  revolutionize the way people use digital images to interact with computing systems.

"piXlogic's advanced image search technology provides a great combination of speed,  accuracy, and compactness," said Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel. "In a multimedia rich age, this  technology can significantly help both commercial enterprises and government  organizations handle vast amounts of images and video."

piXlogic's software is targeted at markets that are forced to deal with the vast amounts  of digital imagery being created daily.  It is vital to the broadcast, advertising, entertainment and media  industries as they try to maximize revenue from reuse of their properties. Further, the piXlogic capabilities are  becoming increasingly important to mobile services companies as sales explode  for camera-enabled phones and PDAs. The  security industry also has a keen interest in visual search technology to help  focus their limited resources on images and video that may contain valuable  information.

"We  believe the piXlogic technology can fundamentally change the way people  interact with images and databases containing digital images and video,"  said Joe Santucci, CEO of piXlogic.  "Having In-Q-Tel select our software is a great validation of our  efforts to create the first practical production-quality Visual Search Engine  technology. We are excited to be working  with experts who will push the envelope on requirements for visual search. This will benefit our customers in all  markets."

"Today  massive amounts of digital imagery are being created and stored," said Dr.  Shelia Guberman, Senior Scientist of piXlogic and inventor of the handwriting  recognition technology used today by Microsoft in Windows CE. "Until now, a user had two options for  finding a particular image -- manually looking through hundreds to millions of  images looking for ones that match his requirements, or tagging each image with  external attributes (keywords or metadata) describing the contents of the image  to be searched later using a text search engine. The latter requires not only manually  reviewing all images and entering those descriptions, but also ensuring that the  descriptions be comprehensive enough to cover all possible words which could be  the subject of future search queries."

‍About piXsearch SDK

‍piXlogic's  piXsearch SDK (software developer kit) can easily be integrated into existing  applications through its well-defined, comprehensive API and industry standard  interfaces. Not only does it extract  accurate logical visual object information from digital images and videos, but  it stores this metadata in a very compact format. The metadata can be searched rapidly using  any arbitrary image, or portion of an image to formulate an object-based visual  search query. By being able to detect  and match objects within images automatically, the software can drastically  reduce the amount of manpower otherwise required to perform these types of  tasks.About piXlogicpiXlogic  provides Image Search Engine (ISE) software that quickly and automatically  indexes and searches for object information in digital images and video. piXlogic's software is targeted at markets forced  to deal with the vast amounts of digital imagery being created daily, including  media asset management, security, and mobile devices. piXlogic is a privately held software  technology company headquartered in Los Altos, CA. For more information go to www.pixlogic.com.