Singapore  - Fifty-six teams from 17 countries will compete in a next-generation multimedia search technology contest starting on Sunday, organizers said.

The team with the best designed search engine for trawling through multimedia data will take home 100,000 US dollars and intellectual property rights to its search engine, said the Agency for Science, Technology and Research on Tuesday.

Among those taking part in the competition are major laboratories from India, China, France, Japan, the United States and Singapore.

The agency is holding the contest to spur the development of multimedia search technology.

"We want to create greater awareness of this and promote its future potential," said Vivek Singh, chairman of the competition.

The participants will work on creating new technology that can search audio and video files online, instead of just text files. (dpa)