TAST-Trademark Application Assistant

In this paper, a Trademark Application Assistant (TAST) that aims to speed up the process of a successful trademark application is proposed. The core of TAST is a similarity-based image retrieval system that makes use of relaxation matching on extracted contour segments. A novelty of this research lies in the processing architecture introduced for adapting the highly effective but computation expensive relaxation matching algorithm to real-time image retrieval. Preliminary results illustrating the quality of matching and the scalability of the processing architecture in terms of response time are included. The proposed architecture is not limited to using relaxation matching based servers, but is also applicable to other types of matching server as well.