- We are hiring!
Despite our best efforts compute clusters and robots still need help and TinEye can’t build all it needs on its own. So we need help. We are hiring for a number of positions but our first need is live on our website: we are looking for an awesome system administrator. Learn about Idée, TinEye – our great reverse image search engine – and our environment before dropping us a note. Would love to hear from you!
- TinEye: new TinEye website release coming soon
While working on our next TinEye website release our product manager is losing her head!
- Ideeplex Potluck
It is Potluck Day in the ideeplex and the TinEye team goodies have been arriving! I am so hungry already! I will try and capture additional photos throughout the day.
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- Happy Thanksgiving
Here in Canada we are celebrating Thanksgiving today so our offices are closed.
[via wikipedia]: The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. Frobisher’s Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming. He had safely returned from a search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. The feast was one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations by Europeans in North America. Frobisher was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him — Frobisher Bay.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
- Google + colour searching
Well it is about time that the Google folks mimicked the Canadian search giants – yes, that’s us! Google introduced colour search to image searching. Nice. Of course it will be awesome! Still no multicolour on Google but you can try a simple hack to get the poor man’s multicolour on Google: search for a colour using a keyword (for example blue sky) and pick a different colour from the drop down. Voila! No great image search results but hey it is a start…
Now if you want the play with the real deal in multicolour searching head over to the Idée lab!
Love how a blog post on LifeHacker about Google’s colour search moves into a full discussion of Idée’s technologies namely: TinEye and Multicolor search. Fun times in the Ideeplex!
- Passion at work
From Mavericks at work
“.. in business, as in basket ball, the smart take from the strong – that the best way to outperform the competition is to outthink the competition.. ” and it’s the “..mavericks do the work that matters most – the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation..” totally driven by passion!
Which makes me really excited about the sold out Refesh event on Monday: where passion meets ignite presentations!
We will start the evening with a passion presentation by Peter Flaschner followed by 6 Ignite presentations and since I am the last one that evening (and it is Monday too!), I will make my TinEye Ignite presentation extra tasty!
StayFresh: 7 PM – 10 PM, Centre for Social Innovation @ 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120 (Map)
Ignite Speakers:
- Erin Bury, RedWire
- Rachel Azagury, CreatingABuzz
- Saul Colt, Freshbooks
- Kieran Huggins, MyTTC
- Noah Godfrey, GigPark
- Leila Boujnane, Idée Inc.
Photograph (c) marfis75
- Open TinEye! And other stuff…
Well folks we’ve heard you loud and clear: “We don’t want to log in to use TinEye“. Good news! TinEye is now open for anyone and everyone to use, without the need to log in or register. Our registered friends – and there are almost 200,000 of you – however, will enjoy some great perks.
And there have been some other changes too!
- Registered users of TinEye will get the opportunity to try out new features first, and provide feedback. You will also be able to link to and share your search results with friends. You will also have the option to keep a search history, including a gallery of images with search dates and the number of results found. And don’t forget that registered users can subscribe to the TinEye newsletter to stay in the loop. Now would you just go and register?!
- We introduced automatic discard of search images after one hour. If you are unregistered–or if you are registered and have disabled search history in your profile–anything you upload to TinEye for search is discarded after an hour.
- We updated the TinEye plugin for FireFox to version 0.5. This update includes a bug fix where if text is highlighted with a background image beneath it, the plugin is not activated.
- The little business of ads appearing on TinEye. Well, they have arrived because little TinEye wants some fluids (especially Robot Oil and Bourbon). You want a free reverse image search engine right?
- We made improvements to search speed and you should be able to play with a faster and sharper TinEye.
Just for the new folks: TinEye is still only searching a 1 billion image index which means if you don’t find a match for your image search it is not the image recognition technology, it is the index! But now that we have this release out the door we will go back to working on the little things: like growing our index!
We appreciate your feedback so keep the kudos and love coming.
So what should you be searching for this morning? Well how about the Obama Hope image that is all the rage this morning? or the little angry baby? Happy searching folks and welcome to the future of image search brought to you by the good folks at Idée.
- Will the real Obama Hope photograph stand up?
I am sure you are wondering what does image recognition have to do with Obama? Me too! A couple of days ago – this is super old news for the blogosphere! – James Danziger posted about how he spent months searching for the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used to create his Obama Hope image. I am sure you have all seen the Obama Hope work?Reading James’ post (which I linked to a couple of days ago) I thought boy if only he had access to the image recognition we take for granted within the Ideeplex walls, his months of research could have been shortened to minutes (James, meet TinEye. TinEye meet James. Now be nice)! But I digress: upon hitting publish on my short post, I received a comment from Waldir who pointed me to a series of Flickr photograph where Stevesimula identifies another photograph as the original. Bam! Would the real Obama Hope photograph please please stand up? No really! Sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that escape you: well, champion how about using our image recognition technology and comparing all the contenders? I mean we can surely spot the fakers? That’s what we ended up doing yesterday but unfortunately I did not have time to post about it. So the results are in and the winner is: Mannie Garcia who shot Obama for the Associated Press.
Stevesimula was the first one to complete his own analysis and came to the above conclusion before we did, we basically took our sophisticated image recognition technology and confirmed his finding.
Tom over at Phillynews did an awesome detective job to locate the original Obama photograph. Read his sleuthing!
Here is what we did: we took the Obama Hope poster and matched it against the two potential source candidate images. For this we used the image comparison engine of TinEye‘s bigger, more powerful brother: PixID. If you thought TinEye can compare images, you should see what PixID can do! PixID takes a detailed look at the patterns of the pixels images, creating digital fingerprints of the source and target images. It can find a small partial match in the fingerprints, even if the images have been heavily transformed. Edits can include crops, flips, rotation, skews or as in this case – literal posterization of the image.
PixID can also calculate a sub-pixel accurate transformation matrix that shows how the images best align to each other. We used that to produce the images shown below. Basically Mannie Garcia’s photograph was the best match.
Below you can view the results. As you mouse over each poster, it will swap to the best possible alignment of the source image we compared it to. If you toggle the images back and forth, you can see the real winner is obvious.
This is the Reuters images which was initially identified by James as the correct match for the Obama Hope poster.
As you mouse over the image to the right, to toggle between the poster and the aligned photograph, you will see that the alignment seems a bit off. Clearly Obama’s head and ears do not line up well at all! So what’s going on? It turns out that the mathematically best alignment possible was to have the lips and nose line up properly (take a look and you will see that they do). If you force the head and ears to line up, then the nose and mouth will be way off. Either way this is not looking like a good match to us.
Now mousing over this image shows a different story. The alignment is near perfect. No question this is a better match. Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Unless of course there is an even better match out there!
- TinEye: the ‘go to’ search engine for images
TinEye fan Jeff left us a quick note to let us know that he spied TinEye in action over on Digg. The post in question – Awesome Spaghetti Junction, what city is this? – included the image below and the simple question:
What city is this?
How can you find out more about an image such as this one when the image is all you have? Simple. Use TinEye.com. TinEye is the only search engine able to find your exact image in over a billion images crawled from the web.
Digg user ka9dgx used TinEye to find the image in a National Geographic Traveler story about Bangkok, Thailand. TinEye also located the original image titled “The Veins of Bangkok” on Flickr, just one of the 26 different instances of this image found on the web.
And who took this shot? Trey Ratcliff, a part-time photographer that I first learned about back in August when I wrote this post about Copyright and Creative Commons. You can see more of Trey’s amazing images by visiting his blog Stuck in Customs.
Click the image below to try the TinEye search yourself and discovery where else Trey’s image has travelled online. Still need to get your TinEye account? Grab one here.
Image: Trey Ratcliff
- To pose, perchance to sleeveface…
As we mentioned last week, the sleeveface contest at the idéeplex during our TinEye Music beta release party was a ton of fun. Now it’s time to select the winners of our sleeveface-off.
To // Sleeveface // : one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.
Here’s the official “How to Sleeveface” video:
As we told our friends at the iParty, the best of the sleeveface snapshots will win a prize. Jen Dodd clearly pulled off a winning sleeveface with her Nina Hagen look below, so she’s queued up for a prize for sure.
Who else do you think deserves a little something for their sleevefacing efforts? Leave us your comments with your top two picks from the photos below and we’ll tally up the votes and award two more prizes.
Steve Jobs says “there’s one more thing…”
Alannah Myles looking fierce
Superman at the idéeplex (looking a little blurry!)
Bob Marley contemplates image search
J.Lo poses (FYI, it’s Amber!)
Sarah Palin is pro-Heineken, gosh darn it!
Okay, so those are our contestants for the prizes. But wait! I have a few more snaps for you – here are the idéalists avoiding work on a Friday afternoon by sleevefacing:
Prince gives idée the thumbs up
Lennon gets serious about image search
Lookin’ fine Barry…
Having a Sheryl Crow moment
Uhm, Leila… that‘s not *quite* right!
- That’s better!
If you are diggin’ the sleeveface you can see more on Flickr and Facebook. Even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is into sleeveface (kind of anyway).
Happy sleevefacing friends! If you try it out remember to post a link to your photos in the comments, we’d love to see them.
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