It’s estimated that about 15 per cent of the billions of online searches we do involves the hunt for images. If you add in searches for video, that number climbs dramatically. So it’s not surprising there is a growing business in helping us find and deal with images.

Gatineau-based BlueBear LES Inc. is making a name for itself in the fight against child pornography victims. Its software helps police catalogue and compare millions of images found during investigations and it does it automatically.

Company CEO Antoine Normand said its lead product, LACE (Law Enforcement against Child Exploitation) is focused on police and the fight against porn, but he sees applications anywhere authorities want facial recognition as a tool. The next step for the company is to apply the same techniques to video.

Toronto-based Idee Inc. is talking with police about its technology called TinEye. What it can do is take an original image and find out all the places it has been posted on the web, even if it has been altered. 

The company’s original area of work was with those who own the rights to images and want to know where those images are being used and are they being compensated. Leila Boujnane, CEO and co-founder of Idee, said Canadian companies can take on the world and win in this growing field. Her company now has more than one billion images on file, which can be compared to images found online.

Another service sends e-mail alerts to a rights holder every time the image is posted online
The newest entry in this image game is Incogna of Ottawa. Last week, it launched its image search engine, incogna.com. What sets it apart is the fact that while you enter a word to start the search, Incogna scans actual images to see if they relate to your search word.

“Today’s leading search engines are great at searching text, but are at a loss when it comes to visual data,” said Kris Woodbeck, founder of Incogna, Inc. and inventor of the technology behind the search engine.

The Incogna engine effectively “sees” each image and is able to organize images at an unprecedented scale and speed. The original development work was done at uOttawa. The company was established last year.

Paul’s website of the week: www.toy-testing.org — Canada’s Toy Testing Council with some great ideas on what to get young ones on your Christmas list.

This Sunday, one of the stories on Tech Now will look at some of the tech gadgets for Christmas.

– Be sure to watch Tech Now this Sunday as part of the CTV NEWS at 6 p.m.