Live data from Hacker News

How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

bits.shutterstock.com

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#11
post #9

"the prototype had over 20 sliders to control all the visual attributes" I cannot read the slider labels, the screenshot is very low-res :(

Sorry about that! The labels on the actual prototype were a bit vague and undescriptive anyway - basically most of the sliders represented various statistics taken over the histograms for each dimension in the LCH colorspace (mean, median, stddev, etc), and then there were a few magical sliders that, to this day, I think only one engineer around here knew how they worked...

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#13

This is really awesome. For anyone who wants a naive, poor man's implementation of this, I have an unfinished Ruby gem that's a good starting point for you: https://github.com/JoshSmith/kaleidoscope Here's how I got it to work (cribbed from my own README): TL;DR: I used k-means clustering to segment a database of images into color bins for quick searching. Using imagemagick, I ran histograms on images and converted t…

That looks pretty cool. As far as scaling issues went, the bulk of them were addressed just by using Solr on pretty beefy hardware (for our full library of 30+ million images, we're running on Dell r510s w/ 24 cores and 128GB Ram). Of course, depending on your hardware limitations there's compromises you can make to increase speed / reduce memory usage - i.e. the fewer fields you need to index and sort on the better & the lower the cardinality of each field, the better too. Also, since our input only consisted of one slider, we were able to run all the distance calculations beforehand, and just store a score that represented the image's distance from the given slider position - something like that might also work for you, since you're using a limited palette of input colors too.

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#14
post #8

Reminds me of TinEye's multicolr demo [0] that searches through CC-licensed images on Flickr. Their multiple color feature was really nice (however they don't have shuttershock's keyword filtering.) I wonder if anyone ever bought TinEye's color-search-engine-as-a-service [1]. The as-a-service model seems really awkward for something that requires so much integration, and this new shuttershock feature (developed from…

I'm really interested in that question too, did anyone buy TinEye's color search service? I hope so.

Personally, I think the TinEye color results are better than Shutterstock's approach....although having meta-data alongside is definitely a must.

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#15

This is really awesome. For anyone who wants a naive, poor man's implementation of this, I have an unfinished Ruby gem that's a good starting point for you: https://github.com/JoshSmith/kaleidoscope Here's how I got it to work (cribbed from my own README): TL;DR: I used k-means clustering to segment a database of images into color bins for quick searching. Using imagemagick, I ran histograms on images and converted t…

clbecker, your account has been shadowbanned so your replies won't show up on any posts. This is very unfortunate because it seems like you're the origin of this post. So, make a new account or something.

Everyone else: If you want to see his comments, turn on the showdead option in your profile.

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#16
post #5

I think the next step for them is to cluster by similar images. A green hue, for instance, shows a lot of similar-looking pictures of leaves—better to show one picture and have a "show similar images" feature to dig into a finer level of variance. V. cool, though.

That'd be a good next post, color retrieval using solr.

Re: How We Built a Cutting-Edge Color Search App

#18
post #15

This is really awesome. For anyone who wants a naive, poor man's implementation of this, I have an unfinished Ruby gem that's a good starting point for you: https://github.com/JoshSmith/kaleidoscope Here's how I got it to work (cribbed from my own README): TL;DR: I used k-means clustering to segment a database of images into color bins for quick searching. Using imagemagick, I ran histograms on images and converted t…

clbecker, your account has been shadowbanned so your replies won't show up on any posts. This is very unfortunate because it seems like you're the origin of this post. So, make a new account or something. Everyone else: If you want to see his comments, turn on the showdead option in your profile.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN