3 ms·
Ask YC: Unexplored Search Paradigms
In these Googlerific days, it's easy to feel like any information I could ever want is at my fingertips. Not so. The other day I was out walking with my 2 yr old and she pointed to a tree and asked what kind it was. My best answer was "Um, a big tree?" Same with flowers, dog breeds, etc.
It made me wonder if anyone is working on (whether startup or research) about visual search. I know I could look for a site showing flowers with names, but I was wondering about where I could send an image and get results. I know this is a complex computer vision and cognitive problem, I'm just curious.
Are there any other ways of searching (besides text keywords) that you wish we had?
- thaumaturgy 19y agoFor your specific example of the tree, I'm only partly joking when I suggest the Audobon Field Guides. I had a bunch of them when I was a kid, and it was easy to look up a specific bird or bug or plant based only on what it looked like.
- ejs 19y agoI have thought about this as well many times, for plant and animal identification it would be very neat to get a system like that to work. You could try to hack it with the mechanical turk... don't know how good those people would be at this sort of thing
- prakash 19y agoDidn't Riya(now like.com) try something along these lines when they started out? The other I believe is NevenVision which google bought.
- justindz 19y agoI messed with something neat about 2 1/2 years ago for Flickr. I saw it surface again recently: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/ http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
- dnaquin 19y agoI often think about the same with audio. Finding a song by beat or chorus. I've seen something along those lines, but nothing I'd actually use yet.
- rplevy 19y agoI remember reading a news story about this exact type of thing a few years ago. I can't find the article but it might have been about LeafView: http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abstract-final.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abs... http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marino-feinerCHI07.pdf http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marin...
- gcheong 19y agoIf you google for "visual search" there seem to be a few places trying to do what you are thinking of, for example http://www.evisionglobal.com/ http://www.evisionglobal.com/
- paulgb 19y agoI know this wouldn't solve your problem, but TinEye (http://ideeinc.com/products/tineye/ http://ideeinc.com/products/tineye/) fits in the "send an image and get results" paradigm.
- globalrev 19y agovisual perception with deep learning, google movies http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416
- rnc000 19y agoan open-source content-based image database server is available at http://server.imgseek.net/ http://server.imgseek.net/