PRIMA-RS, the 'PRIntMedia Advertisement Recognition System', is a distributed system for semi-automatic advertisement recognition in print media, such as newspapers and magazines. This system is composed of two user applications and an automatic advertisement analysis which runs in the background without a graphical user interface.

The AdClipper, which is the first user application, is used to clip advertisements from scanned newspapers and magazines. This application enables the user to clip an advertisement with a single mouse click.

After advertisements have been clipped with the AdClipper, they are compared automatically with the advertisements which are already stored in the database. In this step, it is investigated whether an advertisement is new or whether it belongs to an already existing one. If it is new, which means that the advertisment was printed in this way for the first time, then it is added to the database. The workflow of this automatic analysis is shown in the 2nd screenshot.

The AdComparer, which is the second user application, is used to visualize the results of the automatic advertisement analysis to the end user in order to verify these results. For advertisements which are marked as new, the AdComperer can be used to search manually for similar advertisements in the database. The result, the AdComparer generates includes the following metadata: where was the advertisement printed, how often, in which size, etc. These metadata are stored in the database.