shapeseek

Keep seeing an interesting symbol appearing near my office (on car stickers and signs), it may be an Islamic icon or something, but it occurs to me that without text-based ancillary information, I have no idea of finding out what it means. Dunno if I'm handing away the idea that could have made my dotcom fortune here, but what about a search facility that matches the form of graphics and gives you the best match for your input?

It works something like this: take a big, constantly updated (by spider) database of gifs and jpegs from HTML pages - something like what Google's 'image search' uses. Set up a script to resample all these images to common dimensions. Then the user either uploads their 'search image' to the site (where it is resampled to comparable dimensions) or uses a little paint applet in the site to draw what they want to find. The 'search image' is then compared pixel-by-pixel with the image database and links to the source HTML pages returned in order of accuracy.

I believe there are routines available that have some success in recognising/comparing car registration plates, faces and stuff used by police forces and security bodies; I'm asssuming it would be pretty easy to do something similar for bitmaps. If colour involved too much data processing, we could start with grayscales.

Am I crazy? As a designer, I would use it. Should I take the patent out now and go to see my bank manager?