5 ms·

Reverse image search engine

108 points by wave 18y ago

palish 18y ago
Finally, a practical way to find out the names of porn actresses.
- cdr 18y ago
  Actually, through reading internet minicelbrity TheFerrett, I know there are extensive forums dedicated to that. I suspect the forums still win.
  - palish 18y ago
    Haha, no way. Links? Your Mechanical Turk mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify this porn actress...
    - blasdel 18y ago
      It's a common subject of threads on imageboards (4chan et.al.). People ask for "sauce" (the source of an image), and for MOAR.
      - freakball 18y ago
        There is also [this](http://iqdb.org/ http://iqdb.org/).
        minitrollster 18y ago
        You aren't on reddit, freakball.
        patio11 18y ago
        Looking at the start of this thread I can see how he might have gotten confused.
        freakball 18y ago
        Mr. Face, meet Mr. Palm.
ruby_roo 18y ago
Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc. I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if they have pics of you as well! <tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now. With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of you from the cloud? :O </tangent> Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice." :)
- FlorinAndrei 18y ago
  Privacy is dead, move on.
- blasdel 18y ago
  You can "untag" yourself from other people's facebook photos.
  - thwarted 18y ago
    Aka "opt-out". Which is why privacy is dead: who's going to be able to keep up with that, especially when other people have no problem tagging you if you know about the picture or not.
jpwagner 18y ago
Now would be the time to take down copywritten images from your blog/etc...
- quizbiz 18y ago
  As a photographer I must say that istockphoto and the non licensed (the proper term escapes me) images on flickr give bloggers and web designers no excuses.
  - slig 18y ago
    creative commons licensed
motoko 18y ago
This service didn't work for me, but I'm voting it up in hopes that attention will help this startup as I'd like it to someday.
- coglethorpe 18y ago
  My attempt worked great. It was kind of freaky.
- dc2k08 18y ago
  Nor me when I found it a couple of months ago and I needed such a service. I wanted to source the true manufacturer of a product and all I was finding at the time were a lot of traders who were using the same official product photos. I think it will improve though and the web needs it.
andrewl-hn 18y ago
I was waiting for a service like this for years. I actually haven't thought it's even possible. Thanks!
- palish 18y ago
  I have an idea for how to do a better reverse image search engine. The problem with this one is that it only matches exact images. But what if it was possible to match against any feature within the source image, rather than the exact, entire source image you search for? For each image in the index, break it up into 4x4 tiles, then store a hash code for each tile. Then repeat the process, but offset the boundary of each tile by 1px along the X axis. Repeat 2 more times. Then, for each offset along the X axis, offset down along the Y axis. So you store 16 hashes per 4x4 pixel area. Now, when someone searches for an image, repeat that hashing algorithm for the source image. The results page then returns any image that contains a 4x4 tile that is also contained in the source image, ranked by the number of tiles within the image that is common between the source and result image. The end result is that you can see how the features within an image are used in other images -- so if someone takes the red stapler from Office Space ( http://www.yunasville.com/img/102005/milton.jpg http://www.yunasville.com/img/102005/milton.jpg ) and puts it into a different image, and you search for that red stapler, the results page will still return the photoshopped image, because it'll match the 4x4 tiles on the stapler in both images. I've explained this in a convoluted way, but hopefully I've communicated the essence of the idea. On one hand, there will be more results to filter through, and it's more computationally expensive. But that's fine, the image results are still ranked effectively. On the other hand, it's more computationally expensive.
  - crux_ 18y ago
    ? really ? First, looking at the examples, it doesn't seem to be restricted to exact images, not by a long shot. Second, your approach is hopelessly naive. ;) Consider: rescaling, re-encoding using a lossy image format, color adjustments, and so on. Good news though, I bet your approach is way, way, _less_ computationally expensive than whatever it is they are doing ;) (My guess would be something like SIFT or SURF, probably minus (some) rotation invariance to speed things up, combined with a whole bunch of hackery to make the feature database search suitably fast while still acceptably accurate. Worth your time to google + read up as those algorithms can achieve positive red stapler identification fairly robustly, but you'll be in for rather a lot of math.)
anamax 18y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387
- pixcavator 18y ago
  This isn't as impressive because there is no search. And by the way, neither can recognize rotated images.
  - anamax 18y ago
    > This isn't as impressive because there is no search. Search is a service built on matching and indexing.
aminuit 18y ago
From the FAQ: TinEye was created by Idée Inc. Idée develops advanced image identification and visual search software for photo wire agencies, stock photography firms, entertainment media companies and some of the world's leading imaging firms including Adobe Systems Inc. In other words, yes they intend for it to be used by content owners to find unauthorized use of their IP on the web. On the other hand, they claim to respect robots.txt and give their crawler name on the same page.
- ambition 18y ago
  Well, Idée is an established business that already does the IP search service. This is a new service, but not necessarily for the same purpose.
staunch 18y ago
A good sample image URL: http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif Very impressive work. I can't think of any real need for it myself, but it is cool.
- varun 18y ago
  It definitely is awesome. Just tweeted the founder of this Toronto-based startup for some comments from her in this discussion.
patio11 18y ago
Their crawler could use some work. (I uploaded my PR screenshot of my software. They flagged several copies which are domains 301 redirected to my homepage.) The algorithm, however, is beyond awesome. They found half a dozen instances of my screenshot on the Internet, including my site, some download sites, and a Chinese pirate or two who had gone to the trouble of watermarking my image. I think Getty just had kittens.
globalrev 18y ago
OK one use of this is to check for your copyrighted photos obv. But will people pay for such a service? There are just so many companies starting with seemingly no way to make money.
- mustpax 18y ago
  Content owners pay a lot of money to protect their content. They pay money to lawyers, lobbyists, and companies like Media Sentry to snoop in on P2P traffic. It's not a stretch to say they will pay to find stolen images. I'd venture they'd pay pretty well too.
- ambition 18y ago
  These guys already make money doing exactly that. This is a new service from a well-established small company.
entelarust 18y ago
this works pretty well, try this stock image out: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/istockphoto_3709313-young-caring-doctor.jpg http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/... if you browse the results, it even finds the image's use in formatted/manipulated graphics
habibur 18y ago
From the site after a 0 match result: "TinEye looks for the specific image you uploaded, not the content of the image. TinEye cannot identify people or objects in an image." So it's not what some of us might have been afraid of.
shader 18y ago
This works really well. For some cool examples, check out http://tineye.com/cool_searches http://tineye.com/cool_searches Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result image after you perform a search, to see which part it matched. I've used tineye several times, and it's found the sources of heavily photoshopped images before. They've done a great job.
Keyframe 18y ago
I remember thinking about a service like this but for audio - for example you post a link to youtube video or some similar service and it would match audio in video with a song name. That would be pretty cool and useful.

108 points by wave 18y ago

palish 18y ago

Finally, a practical way to find out the names of porn actresses.

cdr 18y ago
Actually, through reading internet minicelbrity TheFerrett, I know there are extensive forums dedicated to that. I suspect the forums still win.
- palish 18y ago
  Haha, no way. Links? Your Mechanical Turk mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify this porn actress...
  - blasdel 18y ago
    It's a common subject of threads on imageboards (4chan et.al.). People ask for "sauce" (the source of an image), and for MOAR.
    - freakball 18y ago
      There is also [this](http://iqdb.org/ http://iqdb.org/).
      - minitrollster 18y ago
        You aren't on reddit, freakball.
        patio11 18y ago
        Looking at the start of this thread I can see how he might have gotten confused.
        freakball 18y ago
        Mr. Face, meet Mr. Palm.

ruby_roo 18y ago

Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc. I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if they have pics of you as well! <tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now. With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of you from the cloud? :O </tangent> Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice." :)

FlorinAndrei 18y ago
Privacy is dead, move on.
blasdel 18y ago
You can "untag" yourself from other people's facebook photos.
- thwarted 18y ago
  Aka "opt-out". Which is why privacy is dead: who's going to be able to keep up with that, especially when other people have no problem tagging you if you know about the picture or not.

jpwagner 18y ago

Now would be the time to take down copywritten images from your blog/etc...

quizbiz 18y ago
As a photographer I must say that istockphoto and the non licensed (the proper term escapes me) images on flickr give bloggers and web designers no excuses.
- slig 18y ago
  creative commons licensed

motoko 18y ago

This service didn't work for me, but I'm voting it up in hopes that attention will help this startup as I'd like it to someday.

coglethorpe 18y ago
My attempt worked great. It was kind of freaky.
dc2k08 18y ago
Nor me when I found it a couple of months ago and I needed such a service. I wanted to source the true manufacturer of a product and all I was finding at the time were a lot of traders who were using the same official product photos. I think it will improve though and the web needs it.

andrewl-hn 18y ago

I was waiting for a service like this for years. I actually haven't thought it's even possible. Thanks!

palish 18y ago
I have an idea for how to do a better reverse image search engine. The problem with this one is that it only matches exact images. But what if it was possible to match against any feature within the source image, rather than the exact, entire source image you search for? For each image in the index, break it up into 4x4 tiles, then store a hash code for each tile. Then repeat the process, but offset the boundary of each tile by 1px along the X axis. Repeat 2 more times. Then, for each offset along the X axis, offset down along the Y axis. So you store 16 hashes per 4x4 pixel area. Now, when someone searches for an image, repeat that hashing algorithm for the source image. The results page then returns any image that contains a 4x4 tile that is also contained in the source image, ranked by the number of tiles within the image that is common between the source and result image. The end result is that you can see how the features within an image are used in other images -- so if someone takes the red stapler from Office Space ( http://www.yunasville.com/img/102005/milton.jpg http://www.yunasville.com/img/102005/milton.jpg ) and puts it into a different image, and you search for that red stapler, the results page will still return the photoshopped image, because it'll match the 4x4 tiles on the stapler in both images. I've explained this in a convoluted way, but hopefully I've communicated the essence of the idea. On one hand, there will be more results to filter through, and it's more computationally expensive. But that's fine, the image results are still ranked effectively. On the other hand, it's more computationally expensive.
- crux_ 18y ago
  ? really ? First, looking at the examples, it doesn't seem to be restricted to exact images, not by a long shot. Second, your approach is hopelessly naive. ;) Consider: rescaling, re-encoding using a lossy image format, color adjustments, and so on. Good news though, I bet your approach is way, way, _less_ computationally expensive than whatever it is they are doing ;) (My guess would be something like SIFT or SURF, probably minus (some) rotation invariance to speed things up, combined with a whole bunch of hackery to make the feature database search suitably fast while still acceptably accurate. Worth your time to google + read up as those algorithms can achieve positive red stapler identification fairly robustly, but you'll be in for rather a lot of math.)

anamax 18y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387

pixcavator 18y ago
This isn't as impressive because there is no search. And by the way, neither can recognize rotated images.
- anamax 18y ago
  > This isn't as impressive because there is no search. Search is a service built on matching and indexing.

aminuit 18y ago

From the FAQ: TinEye was created by Idée Inc. Idée develops advanced image identification and visual search software for photo wire agencies, stock photography firms, entertainment media companies and some of the world's leading imaging firms including Adobe Systems Inc. In other words, yes they intend for it to be used by content owners to find unauthorized use of their IP on the web. On the other hand, they claim to respect robots.txt and give their crawler name on the same page.

ambition 18y ago
Well, Idée is an established business that already does the IP search service. This is a new service, but not necessarily for the same purpose.

staunch 18y ago

A good sample image URL: http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif Very impressive work. I can't think of any real need for it myself, but it is cool.

varun 18y ago
It definitely is awesome. Just tweeted the founder of this Toronto-based startup for some comments from her in this discussion.

patio11 18y ago

Their crawler could use some work. (I uploaded my PR screenshot of my software. They flagged several copies which are domains 301 redirected to my homepage.) The algorithm, however, is beyond awesome. They found half a dozen instances of my screenshot on the Internet, including my site, some download sites, and a Chinese pirate or two who had gone to the trouble of watermarking my image. I think Getty just had kittens.

globalrev 18y ago

OK one use of this is to check for your copyrighted photos obv. But will people pay for such a service? There are just so many companies starting with seemingly no way to make money.

mustpax 18y ago
Content owners pay a lot of money to protect their content. They pay money to lawyers, lobbyists, and companies like Media Sentry to snoop in on P2P traffic. It's not a stretch to say they will pay to find stolen images. I'd venture they'd pay pretty well too.
ambition 18y ago
These guys already make money doing exactly that. This is a new service from a well-established small company.

entelarust 18y ago

this works pretty well, try this stock image out: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/istockphoto_3709313-young-caring-doctor.jpg http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/... if you browse the results, it even finds the image's use in formatted/manipulated graphics

habibur 18y ago

From the site after a 0 match result: "TinEye looks for the specific image you uploaded, not the content of the image. TinEye cannot identify people or objects in an image." So it's not what some of us might have been afraid of.

shader 18y ago

This works really well. For some cool examples, check out http://tineye.com/cool_searches http://tineye.com/cool_searches Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result image after you perform a search, to see which part it matched. I've used tineye several times, and it's found the sources of heavily photoshopped images before. They've done a great job.

Keyframe 18y ago

I remember thinking about a service like this but for audio - for example you post a link to youtube video or some similar service and it would match audio in video with a song name. That would be pretty cool and useful.