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Idée’s multicolour lab in Brazil!

I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with Daniela who is a journalist for the Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Daniela writes about technology and design and our colour search lab made a great impression on her. As it should! As most of you know we develop visual search technologies: image search technologies that allow you to find similar images in extremely large image collections. This is all done by developing algorithms that analyze the visual attributes of an image (such as shape, colour, composition) and then comparing an image to other images and matching their overall similarities. You can play with that in our visual search lab. When we introduced visual search, a lot of clients, users and people who work with images told us repeatedly that what they would like to see more than visual search perhaps is a good colour search. Now, of course there are a number of colour search products out there but we think our approach is tops. I have a longer post in the plans to explain how our approaches differ from others.

Colour search transcends cultures and languages. We all have colour preferences and describing them in terms of keywords is non-intuitive and certainly very limiting. I like many shades of blue and orange and when searching I would like to express that and be able to see images that are exactly within those requirements. I am personally a big fan of colour search as it is an intuitive way to discover new images and photographs.

In our future plans: a creative commons multi colour search implementation. This will allow our fans to search large creative commons libraries using multi colour to discover new visual works.