These tools are contributing to more cost-effective and efficient business processes, helping organisations to innovate, and enabling researchers to gain new insights into ancient artefacts.
libVIPS is being used by around 1,000 companies to help them develop websites and systems that handle millions of images, using less cloud storage, speeding up processing times and saving more than 50 per cent of computing capacity. libVIPS has enabled Wikipedia to use high-resolution images for the first time, and Amazon Web Services uses it for efficient image handling in its content distribution networks. Other organisations that have adopted libVIPS include The National Gallery, US Food and Drug Administration, Booking.com, The New York Times and Capital One. It is also being used in medical settings to quickly process large diagnostic images.
Similarly, OpenIMAJ is being used by developers across the world, including in large organisations such as Yahoo and Comcast, to quickly create applications that extract information from multimedia data.
The researchers have worked with Ordnance Survey (OS) to develop new ways to exploit aerial imagery. Previous methods for extracting data from OS images were largely manual, making them costly and limited in scope. Southampton’s work on the use of machine learning to extract specific features from aerial images has enabled OS to prototype new data products, for example tools to classify building types and agricultural land use.
Imaging systems designed and built by the Southampton team are being used for museum, archive and university research in institutions worldwide to capture highly detailed images of historical artefacts. For example, researchers at the University of Oxford are using Southampton systems to study and decode fragile tablets inscribed with the world’s oldest undeciphered script. The British Museum uses a similar system for studies where conventional photography is insufficient to capture surface details, and at The Louvre the technology has been used to capture an entire collection of ancient seals for the first time.
Photo credit: Banner image courtesy of Biblioteque Nationale de France.