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Flickr Search Hack Powered by Mouse-Made Doodles
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"
You can upload an image. Go to the site and click Image rather than sketch.
Hooking up with an online collection of photos might be new I guess - but that seems an obvious thing to do.
Yea, I hate to preempt any of the people who have come up with things like this, but I hope no one tries to patent any of these ideas. It's sort of a process that's implicitly defined by the existence multiresolution image decomposition. We shall see.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Silly human, we ARE the AI. Maybe this means we're close to finding the ultimate question...
This can be a problem. For example, I won't be able to check out the actual demo until I get home because I don't know what image it may pull to my work desktop.
.xxx domains. If you want access to it, fine with me. All I ask is that you make it easy for me to discriminate what my kids are exposed to. I want them to be able to use the internet and me to not have to worry about what they might find.
For those of us that run xscreensaver, one of the hacks goes out and gets random images from the web. I had to turn that one off because, random or not, it was getting porn everytime it ran. Now, I'm not a prude, I'm not concerned if my 5 year old son sees the image of a naked woman on my computer screen. To have a problem with that is to have a problem with the human body and I'm not going there. However, if said naked woman is in the process of strapping on a rubber penis....well....that's a bit hard to explain. Alternatively, if it's an image of a person (male or female) being abused....you get the idea.
This leads in to why I support the idea of
A goal is a dream with a deadline