Cortexica, chaired by Nick Kingsbury, is a bio-inspired image recognition business spun out of Imperial College London in February 2009. After six and a half years of research into “human visual cortex”, to understand how humans see – and two years building algorithms and computer models which can accurately mimic human visual recognition – Cortexica is now going live. It’s Visual Search API is now in closed beta, which developers can request access to by emailing api@cortexica.com

One of the first uses of Cortexica’s image system will be seen in the (now live) WINEfindr iPhone app, which claims to be the “world’s first visual search enabled price comparison wine app”. Essentially, users can take a picture of a bottle of wine and WINEfindr returns multiple results so the prices of different retailers can be compared and a whole host of data.

Founder and CEO Steve Semenzato said in his pitch to the Techcrunch GeeknRolla’s first start-up panel of the day: “Where visual search has been in the past, we have taken pictures with phones but now we’re starting to see just how our phones can relate to the label on a product… and we want to expand the horizons of what you can do with this.”

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