- TinEye Cool Searches: Redux
With an updated index and some behind-the-scenes tweaks, TinEye is now better than ever at finding your images in our index of over a billion images. And we just updated our TinEye Cool Searches, showcasing a new crowd of fun and interesting searches for you to explore.
This rather timely stressed out gas-pumper graphic is just one of the nifty searches we’ve included over on TinEye.com. Swing by the Cool Searches page to see the latest additions:
And from the vault of thousands of submitted searches from TinEye fans like you, here are some more Cool Searches that highlight TinEye’s unique ability to locate your images online…
The YSL t-shirt search returns several product shots:
A search for this Obama t-shirt returned this interesting combination of images. As you can see, TinEye can still find the original image even when it has been skewed:
This dog just might be the busiest dog on the web. He is the Everywhere Girl of the animal kingdom! TinEye found him sharing the Tao of Happiness, cheering on Sox fans, talking about his food allergies and more. He also popped up in support of Barack Obama and John McCain, he’s even keen on the fictitious Stewart – Colbert ’08 election ticket. He is one confounded political pup. Check out his over 100 results from TinEye:
And lastly, one of our earlier test images was J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!“, commonly referred to as Rosie the Riveter. With the updated index TinEye returns over 700 results for this American cultural icon including a snapshot of an original “We Can Do It!” wall thermometer and some rather amusing photoshop edits:
Discovered your own TinEye cool search? Remember, you can submit them to us for review and inclusion to our Cool Searches page by clicking the “Recommend as a Cool Search” link on your TinEye results page.
- Search Flickr for Multicolrful Images
Our Multicolr Search Lab is the first tool on the web that enables searching by colour through 10 million creative commons images from Flickr.
Idée’s Piximilar is the technology behind the Multicolr Search Lab. While most colour search tools can only identify the dominant colour in an image, our technology allows you to choose up to 10 colours from a palette of 120 different shades (thought it can handle any colour palette imaginable).
Cameron Parkins from creativecommons.org says our Multicolr Search “is a ton of fun and a great way to find some really beautiful CC-licensed images” and Website magazine calls it “a must for bloggers, or anyone else who wants to get photos with a specific color scheme.”
Here’s an example search by blogger Aditi
You can adjust your search results by adding more of certain colours and less of others to feature your favourite colours more prominently in the images returned. Abhijeet shared our colour search tool with the readers over at makeuseof.com and demonstrated how you can dynamically search with just a few clicks.
From a selection of orange-based images…
…to the ‘pop’ and interest of oranges, greens and browns.
As you pick and choose your colours the search results automatically refresh with images that represent your new colour selections. When you click on any image it directs you to that photo on Flickr so you can learn more.
Looking for images of buildings? Try a grey-blue search combo, pulling in the colours of stone and sky.
Bryan Lee who blogs on OriginalProgram.Intermissions has a really great example of Multicolr in action with his black and purple search, below. His thoughts? “Here’s a great resource for finding color coordinated photos through Flickr. Whether you are designing and need it for storyboards, or simply want to mess around on the web, this makes for a great little web app.”
Here’s another search idea. Using bright colours and plenty of white I created a “comic book and cartoon characters” inspired search:
The combinations are endless.
- 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.
- Colour Search and Colour Love
COLOURlovers is a nifty site where you can check out a world of colour, compare colour palettes, submit news and comments, and read colour related articles and interviews.
We were happy to hear that the nice folks at COLOURlovers have much love for the Idée Labs.
Idée Labs is Idée’s technology playground for visual search and image recognition. You can experiment and play with various implementations of Idée’s visual search technologies.
With Multicolour Search (Alamy and Flickr sets), Visual Search and BYO Image Search there are plenty of ways to work with colour and search millions of images in the Labs.
Says COLOURlovers member Shweta “This is amazing…we can get inspiration for theme board, texture boards — I have gone crazy” and dbme says “Those are some fantastic tools.”
We’re glad you are all enjoying our labs, stay tuned for more fun to be released soon!
- Taking the lead in visual search
Idée and TinEye get a nod from Tom Keenan in ‘Cloud computing a down-to-earth solution’ from last month’s Business Edge. Keenan says “Idée is definitely in the visual search-engine lead.” Yes we are!
- Democamping at the Board of Trade
Board of Trade + DemoCamp = Awesomeness
I did a presentation at the board of trade as part of the Technology Innovators Breakfast and had a great time. This board of trade session was a democamp facilitated session: ie two technology democamp presentation were done during the board of trade monthly technology innovators breakfast. Anand from Bumtop and I were the two democamp presenters.We managed to bridge the gap between suits + democampers. Michael Murphy, VP and General Manager at Symantec did the first presentation and Anand and I followed with our respective presentations. What did I learn at the Board of Trade? Well quite a few things:
- there are still people in the technology space in Toronto who don’t know about democamp; how is that possible?
- there are still folks who have never been involved with a community driven and community built group such as democamp; some of the questions I fielded had to do with “who runs DemoCamp” and “why should anyone get involved?”;
- we still need to get the word out about what DemoCamp to folks all over Toronto (and the world)
- the bridge between the business, finance and start up community is still very wide; we know of each others existence but we don’t interact much. I wonder every day how we can improve these interactions.
I think that a few more democamps at the board of trade would help create better relationships between the business community and technology in Toronto and could foster some great pollination. I am looking forward to it.
It was very interesting to demo our new visual search labs and see these participants reactions first hand. I wish we had put the labs together a lot earlier than we did. The visual search and multi-colour labs are a great way for anyone to explore visual and colour search since they can play and search a 3 million image collection on their own. There is nothing better than being able to play with something new on your own. The feedback we have received so far has been great and I am looking forward to the next features. I usually start by demo-ing our image recognition service and almost always forget our visual search technology. I get too involved in answering all the image recognition questions!It will be interesting to see who comes to DemoCamp 16 next week at the board of trade and if some of the Technology Innovators Breakfast will join us.
- BYO Image Search Lab
Which images in Alamy’s massive stock photo collection resemble the Google logo?Or the American flag?
How about the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?
Or a No Smoking Sign?
Thanks to our new BYO Image Search Lab, you can Bring Your Own image via upload or URL and find out for yourself.
Our top-secret super cutting-edge algorithms will analyze your image and carefully determine its dominant properties. Once it learns about its shapes, colours, and textures, it will instantly summon all the pictures that your image resembles.
Go ahead, find a visually distinct image and reveal its matches. Dogs that look like baked goods, Brad Pitt who looks like… well, everyone else.
Sure, Visual Search was great for browsing, but this is even more crazy-fun!
Try it out and let us know what you think (and what kind of wacky things you managed to find) in a comment below. Have lots of fun!
Frequently Asked Questions
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. Read the rest…
- 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. Read the rest…
- Visual Search Contest Winners!
A few weeks ago, the good folks at Idée brought you the Visual Search Lab with a little iPod Shuffle contest. In the Visual Search Lab you can use Idée’s Visual Search technology to search for visually similar images in a 3 million image collection. The image collection used for this lab is Alamy‘s image collection.
We had some fantastic submissions which made our winner selection a bit difficult so we increased the number of winners. So if your name appears below you will be contacted and you will soon receive your winning iPod Shuffle. Congratulations!
1. Rannie’s Mapletastic Visual Search
- Multicolour Search Lab
Colour vision from Idée!
Today we launch the Idée Multicolour Search Lab. In this lab you can search Alamy’s 2.8 million images using multicolours, yes all the colours of the rainbow if you want because when we say multicolour we mean exactly that. Select one colour or several to find images that contain those colours in real time. Everything is better in colour.
For the visual and image search fanatics out there, we have taken our algorithms to the next level: our search results don’t require an exact colour match and cope well with images that contain multiple colours going beyond simple colour histogram matching.
By allowing you to select multiple colours we give you the ability to search for images that match a palette of colours. Want an image with lots of green and just some red? No problem.
Want rainbows? No problem.
And of course none of this would be relevant if it was not for performance and speed! Our super fast visual search engine performs a live colour search in this set of 2.8 million images in a fraction of a second.
So go play and ping us with your feedback. Comment below. Happy searching!
Frequently Asked Questions
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. Read the rest…
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