Convera Announces Visual RetrievalWare 5.0; Corporations and Government Agencies Among Users for Image-Based Digital Library and Positive Identification Applications.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 5, 2002

Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR) today announced the availability of Visual RetrievalWare(R) 5.0, the latest version of the company's search and retrieval software development kit (SDK) for digital images and video.

Featuring new platform support, new APIs, support for additional file formats and upgraded system performance, Visual RetrievalWare enables commercial and government software developers to more effectively use their image and video content in applications such as positive identification, digital library, crime investigation, document imaging and electronic shopping initiatives.

Among the more than 25 customers benefiting from the use of Visual RetrievalWare are Honeywell and the Swedish intelligence community.

With this release, Convera also strengthens its position as the leading single source provider of search, retrieval and categorization solutions for all enterprise data, whether text, video, audio or image files.

The capabilities made available to software developers using Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 are the same proprietary media indexing capabilities found in Convera's RetrievalWare family of products and extensions such as Screening Room(R).

Visual RetrievalWare provides software developers with a rich image and video development environment that enables the creation of applications that help end users find what they are looking for based on image and video content rather than just words.

Originally released in 1996, Visual RetrievalWare was the industry's first comprehensive application development software to automatically index and retrieve visual data. The open architecture allows domain experts to provide their own image and video "feature extraction" algorithms, while providing a search and indexing infrastructure tailored for visual data.

Several "feature extractors" are provided as part of the SDK, including color, shape and texture indexing for images, as well as Convera's award-winning Video Analysis Engine (VAE) whose independent, pluggable analysis components perform automated shot-boundary detection (frame-accurate identification of cuts, fades, and dissolves), clip matching (identifying similar sequences of frames using fuzzy pattern recognition) and more.

Clip matching is particularly unique, making it possible to search live streams or enormous video libraries for matching sequences of arbitrary format, dimension, frame rate and duration. (Go to http://vrw.convera.com:8015/cst/ to see Visual RetrievalWare at work).

New capabilities and features offered by Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 include:

-- New File Format Support: Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 now features support for more than twenty of the most widely used image and video formats. New image formats supported include PCX, PNM, SGIRGB, TGA and XPM. Image formats already supported include BMP, DDIF, GIF, ICO, JFIF, PDA, PNG, TIFF and XBM. TYS has been added to the list of supported video formats, which also includes AVI, FIT, MPEG2, PIT, QT and SMJ.

-- New Platform Support: Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 is now available on Darwin, FreeBSD and NetBSD platforms. Visual RetrievalWare can also run on Linux, Solaris and Windows.

-- New APIs: - New APIs included in Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 are an Associative Memory API for memory management and Time Code conversion support for common frame representations such as microseconds, frames, NTSC and non-drop.

-- System Performance Enhancements: New enhancements include MPEG decompression performance and image format support, added support for QuickTime 5 and an upgrade to Tcl/Tk 8.4a4.

-- New Core Algorithms: Visual RetrievalWare 5.0 features enhancements for automatic video clip indexing and fuzzy search.

Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies is using Visual RetrievalWare as the core technology for a dynamic U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) archive of photographs and x-ray images.

Using either searches based on either image content or keywords, employees are able to search and retrieve from a five-year legacy inventory of over 13,000 hi-resolution photographs (saved as jpeg files) of the people, weapons and facilities of Honeywell. Honeywell also plans to index and search across an archive of over one million product-related x-ray images.

Each product manufactured by Honeywell has been x-rayed, resulting in a five tractor-trailer load archive of images.

The Swedish National Criminal Intelligence Service is fighting against the sexual exploitation and abuse of children by using Visual RetrievalWare to quickly identify new incidents of online criminal activity and to gather investigative clues into the activities of pedophiles and those who profit from the distribution of child pornography.

The Swedish police are investigating pedophile-related cases more effectively and efficiently by comparing newly gathered pornographic images against an existing database of over 300,000 images seized from computers and websites around the world.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of search, retrieval and categorization software products and solutions that enable organizations to integrate all sources of information, navigate that information to return needed answers and collaborate on results published to internal and external portals or other applications.

Convera's advanced technologies and products enable organizations to optimize the value of all their content, establishing an information infrastructure that effortlessly scales to provide large numbers of users with fast, accurate, web-enabled access to all relevant information for a broad range of business critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, customer relationship management and many more.

For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at [e-mail] or on the Web at www.convera.com.

This release, including any statements from Convera personnel, contains statements about Convera's future expectations, performance, plans, and prospects, as well as assumptions about future events. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, business and economic conditions and trends; continued success in technological advances; possible disruption in commercial activities caused by terrorist activity and armed conflict, such as changes in logistics and security arrangements; reduced customer demand relative to expectations; competitive factors; and other risk factors listed from time to time in the company's SEC reports. Actual results may differ materially from our expectations as the result of these and other important factors relating to Convera's business and product development efforts, which are further described in Convera's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings can be obtained from the SEC's website located at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Convera on the date of this release, and Convera assumes no obligation to update such statements.

The Convera design logo and the following are worldwide trademarks of Convera: Convera(TM), RetrievalWare(R), and Screening Room(R). The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.