By Teh Jen Lee

IMAGINE having to find a phrase that someone used in a YouTube video clip.

Today's search engines, which depend on words, will be able to find the clip only if it has been transcribed into text.

Similarly for a photograph, it can't be found if it has no caption.

To help encourage the next generation of multi-media search engines that are not based on text, the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*Star) recently held a 10-month-long international competition to look for bright sparks.

And the winner of the contest, which ended last month, turned out to be a three-member team from the National University of Singapore.

They beat teams from China, France, Japan and USA in the finals, which were held in Fusionopolis, to walk away with the top prize of US$100,000 ($150,000).

All five finalist teams had gone through three increasingly difficult challenges before the finals.

The first challenge was a voice search to be completed in two days based on around 20 hours of broadcast audio database.

Tasks included finding a particular phrase regardless of the language spoken.

The second challenge was a video search to find similar images and clips, while the third challenge involved voice and video searches using 10 hours of multilingual database.

The finals saw the teams doing voice and video searches using 15 to 20 hours of database in four languages. Results had to be submitted in two hours.

It was a close race.

Accuracy

Dr Neo Shi Yong, 28, from the NUS laboratory for media search, said: 'We only moved to the first position in the last 10 minutes of the competition because our strategy was to spend time refining our results, checking them for accuracy. That's why our submission was much better.'

Team-mate Victor Goh, 28, who is also from the same lab said: 'We are absolutely elated to win the Star Challenge! We would like to thank Professor Chua Tat Seng and all who have supported us.

'We are pleased with the end results as well as honoured to be up against so many worthy contestants.'

Prof Chua is from the department of computer science in NUS.

Professor Charles Zukoski, chairman of A*Star's Science and Engineering Research Council, said: 'This competition has brought together highly talented young people from all over the world not only in the spirit of competition, but also in the spirit of exchange and friendship.

'Who knows, one day, we may find that some of these young people have collaborated together to give us the next multi-media search engine!'

The contestants included search engine enthusiasts as well as a few of the world's top laboratories.

All of the contestants own the intellectual property to their technologies.

So what will the winners be doing with the prize money?

Dr Neo said: 'We might be starting a company to do multi-media searches. It will take a lot of resources to develop the technology until it can be used by the public like Google.

'It took 20 years for text searches to be developed. It's going to take at least five years for multi-media searches to be widely available.'

This article was first published in The New Paper on 24 Nov 2008.