ALIPRABOUT US

The ALIPR (pronounced a-lip-er), launched officially on November 1, 2006, is a machine-assisted image tagging and searching service being developed at Penn State by Professors Jia Li and James Z. Wang. They started their work as early as in 1995 while they were both with the Stanford University. They attempted to develop computer systems to manage millions of images by the pixel content. They have developed the WIPE (TM) system, the first good-accuracy image-based parental control filter for Web images, in 1997. They have also developed the SIMPLIcity (TM) image similarity search engine, handling millions of images in real-time, in 1999 (note: this is unrelated to the later Picture Simplicity - Picasa work by Google). For a demonstration of SIMPLIcity on more than one million images, check out Airliners.net, the largest online community for aviation fans (sample queries: 1, 2, 3). You can also check out the largest photography collection of US National Parks, terragalleria.com (sample queries: 1, 2, random).

ALIPR (TM), developed in 2005, published and made public in October 2006, is Patent Pending. The ALIPR automatic image annotation engine has a vocabulary of 332 English words at the moment. However, many more English words can be used to search for pictures. ALIPR version 1.0 is designed for color photographic images. ALIPR 1.0 is not designed for black&white photos, manipulated photos, objectionable images, cartoons, sketches, framed photos, etc. However, we welcome any types of images on this site, as long as the pictures are not objectionable to participants of the community. ALIPR's prelude was our ALIP system, annotating pictures with 600 semantic concepts, published in 2002.

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The site is currently available in English. However, you are welcome to access this site using an online translator. Click one of the above links to access a free translator. The automatic translation may not be accurate. You can also go directly to a translator site and enter the URL "http://alipr.com".

Services and Acceptable Use Policy:
The services provided on this site are for human interactive use only. Due to limited computing resources, any automated use is strictly prohibited unless prior approval is obtained. We will try to keep the services on this Website free and free of advertisement.

An XML API for application developers, search services, and many other services will be made available. Please check back this site for updates. Let us know what you think or suggestions to make the services more useful to you. Email to

Please do not upload materials that can be offensive to other users of the services. Do not purposely check off wrong tags after an image is uploaded. We reserve the rights to terminate your use or block access to your pictures if such activities are detected. Please try to upload pictures of good taste.

If the ALIPR annotation service is used in your non-commercial application, we would request that you include the following image link back to alipr.com. Commercial use can be arranged with prior permission.
Powered by ALIPR Sample HTML Code:
 <A HREF=http://alipr.com><IMG BORDER=0 WIDTH=120 SRC=http://alipr.com/pict/poweredbyalipr.gif ALT="Powered by ALIPR" TITLE="Powered by ALIPR"></A>

If you like the ALIPR search and would like to add ALIPR in your search engine list, click

The ALIPR image search service is being developed as a ATOM/RSS feed based open search engine service. More functions will be made available. It is currently available on search engine directory.

Remove an Image from this site: Many of the images may be copyrighted by the original owners. Copyright of these images remains with the original owners. They are shown on this site merely for search convenience and for illustrating academic research progress. If you are the owner of an image, or for any other reasons, would like us to remove the image from the searchable collection, please email to let us know. We will remove the image right away. Thanks.

Ten Reasons to ALIPR your pictures: (tell us about your own thoughts)
  1. Make your pictures visible to the search engine and hence to Web surfers and stock photo agencies;
  2. Let your intelligence be incorporated in ALIPR as she grows up;
  3. It's just fun to see how childish ALIPR can be some times;
  4. See the potential of machine intelligence first hand;
  5. Motivate students to learn about mathematics, science, and information technology;
  6. Support science research through your action;
  7. Demonstrate your creativity with unusual pictures;
  8. Search for, view, and rate other alipred pictures;
  9. Discover the imagination power of ALIPR;
  10. Teach others or learn about certain concepts through pictures.
There are many ways you can participate in the development of this site. Find out more.

How to Paste in a URL of an Image on the Internet:
On a typical Web site, if you are using the free Firefox browser, you can simply drag and drop the image from a Web page into the URL field. Or, use Ctrl+right mouse button on the image, you will see a menu in which you can click "Copy Image Location". Then you can directly paste into ALIPR.
If you are a user of Flickr, you can get the URL of most Flickr images. First use the View Image function when the menu pops up, then copy the URL of the image from the browser's URL field.
You can try to drag and drop a file into the file upload field. Many browsers support this.

Main Scientific Publications Include View Results:
random images - keyword search - Flickr images

Example annotations provided by ALIPR
landscape building historical mountain man-made indoor people lake animal flower plant rose cactus flora grass landscape water perennial grass animal wild-life sport people rock tree horse polo
texture indoor food natural people animal landscape rock man-made man-made indoor painting people food fruit mural old poster grass landscape tree lake autumn people rural texture natural

The Key Developers of ALIPR:

Jia Li
jiali @ psu.edu
+1-814-863-3074
James Z. Wang

+1-814-865-7889
Other Members of the Website Team:

Members of Jia Li and James Z. Wang's research group are contributing many ideas to improve the services on the site. Especially:

Ritendra Datta is working on algorithms which can potentially be used in future versions of this site. (2006- )
Razvan Orendovici is developing new PHP/SQL based functionalities. (2007- )

Many students of James Wang's database course in the Spring 2007 semester have contributed ideas useful for some up-coming features.

Past and Virtual Team Members:
Diane Flowers conducted initial evaluation before the 2006 ACM publication. (2005)
Dhiraj Joshi developed image annotation services for special projects and was responsible for batch processing capabilities. He has also developed new algorithms, such as the story picturing engine, for deployment on this site. Dhiraj is currently a Scientist at the Kodak Research. (2006-2007)
Walter Weiss has developed an initial keyword search function of pictures and is developing XML APIs. He has managed the systems. He has also participated in eduation activities for a related undergraduate database course. Walter is currently working for the U.S. Department of State and is a "virtual" member of the alipr team. (2006-2007)
In the News: Discovery, MIT Tech Review, Scientific American, more ...
If you would like to read about the accuracy evaluations in more details, please check out the scientific publication (linked above).


Sponsorship: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 0347148 and 0219272. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Foundation has funded some work which laid the foundation to the deployment of version 1.0 of ALIPR. We are currently seeking funding to significantly improve this technology and make it more useful. If you would like to sponsor or partner with us, please contact James Wang. We are in great need of hardware support to make this site useful to the public. If you work for one of the hardware companies and would like to sponsor some storage, server, and networking equipment, we will put a logo of your company on this site.

If you have questions or comments, please email James Wang ().



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