US Patent 7865492 Semantic visual search engine

An improved method, device and computer program product for enabling a system to learn, categorize and search items such as images and video clips according to their semantic meanings. According to the present invention, prominent features can be separated from low-level features in an item using supervised learning approaches. Prominent features are used to categorize and annotate new target items. Users can then use key words and/or template items for searching through the respective database.