Microsoft unveiled at its fourth annual Demo Fest early-stage advertising projects at its headquarters. The revolutionary technologies are developed by Microsoft's adCenter Labs. The company flexed its research muscles to show off ad tools tied with sound, image and video processing, a field where Microsoft is still ahead of Google.

The cutting edge projects feature content analysis and computer vision for video and images, speech recognition for contextual video ads, and advanced marketing intelligence that enable enhanced audience insight and better targeting capabilities for advertisers, the company said in a statement.

"We believe the technical advances and intelligence we are creating at adCenter Labs can change the game of online advertising," said Tarek Najm, technical fellow at Microsoft. "Solutions to today's challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data," Najm said.

There were seven demos showcased: Air Wave, a technology which enables advertisers to engage consumers outside of the home in public places such as an airport or a shopping mall through an interactive, multitouch screen display; Contextual Ads for Video, which uses speech recognition to serve ads dynamically based on what is discussed in the video; Intelligent Bug Ads, which locates nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads, by approximating human judgment; Visual Product Browsing, which uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might; Content Analysis Engine which is a tool for engine marketers to use to discover valuable keywords relevant to their category; Content Detection in Sub-documents, which identifies sensitive or unsuitable content such as pornography, weapons or negative sentiments that advertisers would not likely want to be associated with; and, finally, Ad Research Dashboard, built on the success of the Keyword Services Platform, a data analysis system to maximize the effectiveness of search marketing campaigns.

After Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion last year, the Redmond company has acquired digital marketing firm aQuantive for 6 billion dollars in a bid to prevent Google's total domination of the online advertising market. The purchase consolidated Microsoft's position in display ads that use sound and video, an area where the company still ranks ahead of Google, which only dominates the market for ads linked to search terms.