US Patent 7565139 Image-based search engine for mobile phones with camera

An image-based information retrieval system is disclosed that includes a mobile telephone and a remote server. The mobile telephone has a built-in camera and a communication link for transmitting an image from the built-in camera to the remote server. The remote server has an optical character recognition engine for generating a first confidence value based on an image from the mobile telephone, an object recognition engine for generating a second confidence value based on an image from the mobile telephone, a face recognition engine for generating a third confidence value based on an image from the mobile telephone, and an integrator module for receiving the first, second, and third confidence values and generating a recognition output.