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Reverse image search engine

tineye.com

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Re: Reverse image search engine

#21

Post by crux_ »

palish wrote: post #11
andrewl-hn wrote: post #7

I was waiting for a service like this for years. I actually haven't thought it's even possible. Thanks!

I have an idea for how to do a better reverse image search engine. The problem with this one is that it only matches exact images. But what if it was possible to match against any feature within the source image, rather than the exact, entire source image you search for? For each image in the index, break it up into 4x4 tiles, then store a hash code for each tile. Then repeat the process, but offset the boundary of e…

? really ?

First, looking at the examples, it doesn't seem to be restricted to exact images, not by a long shot.

Second, your approach is hopelessly naive. ;) Consider: rescaling, re-encoding using a lossy image format, color adjustments, and so on.

Good news though, I bet your approach is way, way, _less_ computationally expensive than whatever it is they are doing ;)

(My guess would be something like SIFT or SURF, probably minus (some) rotation invariance to speed things up, combined with a whole bunch of hackery to make the feature database search suitably fast while still acceptably accurate. Worth your time to google + read up as those algorithms can achieve positive red stapler identification fairly robustly, but you'll be in for rather a lot of math.)

Re: Reverse image search engine

#22

Post by freakball »

blasdel wrote: post #14
palish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, no way. Links? Your Mechanical Turk mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify this porn actress...

It's a common subject of threads on imageboards (4chan et.al.). People ask for "sauce" (the source of an image), and for MOAR.

There is also [this](http://iqdb.org/).

Re: Reverse image search engine

#23

Post by patio11 »

Their crawler could use some work. (I uploaded my PR screenshot of my software. They flagged several copies which are domains 301 redirected to my homepage.)

The algorithm, however, is beyond awesome. They found half a dozen instances of my screenshot on the Internet, including my site, some download sites, and a Chinese pirate or two who had gone to the trouble of watermarking my image.

I think Getty just had kittens.

Re: Reverse image search engine

#24

Post by thwarted »

blasdel wrote: post #20
thwarted wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aka "opt-out". Which is why privacy is dead: who's going to be able to keep up with that, especially when other people have no problem tagging you if you know about the picture or not.

When they tag you in a picture you get a notification -- it's how someone implicitly 'tells you' about a picture they have of you.

Assuming you're on the system they are doing the tagging on (it's easy when it's just Facebook, but a photo could be tagged on Flickr with your real name and you'd never know), and you check your email (or whatever method of notification they provide), and a host of other things that put more work on those who are trying to control their exposure. That's the problem with opt-out, and that's why thinking you can maintain your privacy by monitoring what other people do is folly.

Re: Reverse image search engine

#26

Post by blasdel »

thwarted wrote: post #24
blasdel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they tag you in a picture you get a notification -- it's how someone implicitly 'tells you' about a picture they have of you.

Assuming you're on the system they are doing the tagging on (it's easy when it's just Facebook, but a photo could be tagged on Flickr with your real name and you'd never know), and you check your email (or whatever method of notification they provide), and a host of other things that put more work on those who are trying to control their exposure. That's the problem with opt-out, and that's why thinking you can maint…

If the image tag on Facebook isn't linked to your profile, there's no way for anyone to find it, unless they were friends with the poster and browsed to the photo.

Flickr is more public, but they don't do any user-graph linking at all, the photo annotations are plain text. I don't think the annotations are even exposed to google.

Re: Reverse image search engine

#27

Post by esang »

palish wrote: post #11
andrewl-hn wrote: post #7

I was waiting for a service like this for years. I actually haven't thought it's even possible. Thanks!

I have an idea for how to do a better reverse image search engine. The problem with this one is that it only matches exact images. But what if it was possible to match against any feature within the source image, rather than the exact, entire source image you search for? For each image in the index, break it up into 4x4 tiles, then store a hash code for each tile. Then repeat the process, but offset the boundary of e…

Somebody from google gave a talk at my college a few years back about image searching algorithms. He explained an algorithm that does more general matching than tineye and it seemed to work great. One of the demonstrations was a search for a starbucks logo that turned up a bunch of pictures that had a starbucks cup somewhere in them. I wish I could remember more details, but unfortunately a quick google search didn't turn up anything.

Re: Reverse image search engine

#28

Post by anamax »

pixcavator wrote: post #25
anamax wrote: post #9

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387

This isn't as impressive because there is no search. And by the way, neither can recognize rotated images.

> This isn't as impressive because there is no search.

Search is a service built on matching and indexing.

Re: Reverse image search engine

#29

Post by minitrollster »

freakball wrote: post #22
blasdel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common subject of threads on imageboards (4chan et.al.). People ask for "sauce" (the source of an image), and for MOAR.

There is also [this]( http://iqdb.org/ ).

You aren't on reddit, freakball.
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