Theia: Research Project to Search Photos on Smartphones in Real-time

You’ve probably seen or read about apps and services that aggregate photos to get multiple perspectives of a single place or event at a place. You may also be familiar with projects that rely on people donating a portion of their computer’s time for massively difficult problems like detecting an extra-terrestrial signal or protein folding. Researchers at Rice University have combined these concepts to provide a way to search photos stored locally on smartphones to find objects (including people) in collections of crowd sourced photos in near real-time.