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Visual Search Lab

We recently redesigned our Visual Search Lab. Stay tuned for more changes and additions. You can search for visually similar images using Idée’s ground-breaking visual search on Alamy’s image collection of 2.8 million images. We believe this is the biggest visual search implementation online today.

So go ahead and give it a go. Feedback, comments, feature requests all welcome. Please comment below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is the Idée’s Visual Search Lab?
A. The Visual Search Lab (VSL) is Idée’s technology playground for visual search. Use it to find similar images in a large image collection.

Q. What is Visual Search?
A. Visual search is a way to search through a collection of images by visual attributes like shape, colour, texture, etc.. Visual search does not rely on the use of keywords, watermarking or any other metadata–it relies strictly on the appearance of the image.

Q. How does it work?
A. Idée’s Visual Search uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze the visual attributes of an image, including: colours, shapes, textures, luminosity, complexity, objects, regions and many other features. These attributes form a compact digital signature that describes the appearance of each image, and these signatures are calculated by and indexed by our software. When performing a visual search, these signatures are quickly compared by our search engine to return visually similar results.

Q. How do I perform a visual search?
1. Start by entering a keyword or selecting a random image.
2. Choose the image you want by clicking on it.
3. Instantly retrieve visually similar images! Repeat.

Q. What does ‘visual similarity’ mean?
A. Visual Similarity is the degree to which images resemble each other in terms of their visual attributes. Images may have the same ‘look’ when they share characteristics such as colour, shape, texture, and luminosity (for example).

Note that visual similarity does not necessarily mean similar subject matter. You may use keywords to further refine your visual search results.

Q. Whose images are these?
A. The 2.8 million stock images used by Idée’s Visual Search Lab are Alamy images.

Q. What is an ‘interesting search’?
A. Interesting searches are examples of real visual search results, selected by Idée to showcase the capabilities of Idée’s visual search. If you would like to submit a cool search email your link to vsl [at] ideeinc.com.

Q. Can I purchase any of these images?
A. Yes, images may be purchased through alamy.com. To do so, click on the image so that it appears in the ‘Search Image’ area, then click on it again. This will open the image on Alamy’s website, in another window.

Q. I have a lot more questions about Idée’s visual search technology, who can I talk to?
A. Well, get in touch. The good folks at Idée can be reached at info [at] ideeinc.com.

Q. Who is Idée?
A. Idée Inc. develops advanced image recognition and visual search software.

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