XCavator - Image Search..

Image recognition has been one of the most talked about technologies and quite a few companies have tried to recognize the potential in this genre. I came across Xcavator, which is an image search engine for stock photos working on similar lines. I tried my hands on this and the results were quite interesting. They provide more than just a couple of options to search an image -
- Color Search; select the hue and also the hue intensity and you'll be presented with a lot of images matching the criteria.
- Image Upload; upload any image and similar images will be listed from its database.
- Tag Search; this is a no brainer, just click on the tag and all the potential candidates will be shown.
- Mix and match the above options.
Xcavator also allows to select a part of the upload image - for instance, if an image of a car is uploaded to search for similar images; then the one can select say the wheel of the uploaded image, and the search will follow suit. XCavator is in the beta version and powered by Cognisign. However, I did try the face recognition part as well, but I guess they are still to get that in place.
For naive folks like me, stock photos mean that license needs to be bought on either once-buy-forever-use basis or on a normal royalty basis.
Update: Just saw that Techcrunch has posted their review on the same. Read the same here..