Visual Search Engine Tracks Stolen Images

Barence writes "A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel-by-pixel search across the internet, flagging all instances of that image even if it's been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way. It's not just for copyright enforcement though; 'it's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos.' It's currently in beta, but you can try it out."

Comments

Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identification

[eldavojohn]

"it's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos."

This may be nitpicking but I read the FAQ and it does not, in fact, claim to be able to accomplish this unless that exact same 'old photo' is posted elsewhere on the internet:

Can TinEye find alterations of a query image?

Yes. As long as they are alterations of the same query image, TinEye can find them and include them in your search results.

Note that search results are ordered by 'relevance' (i.e. how well the result images match your query image), so image alterations are typically found at the end of your search results.

How does TinEye work?

TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks.

TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.

So this example they list of the soldier must rely on the fact that the website contained the same exact image that the people had of the old soldier they were looking for. I can't expect it to take any image of Person A and return every single image (past & present) of that person. That's ridiculous.

I would expect that to work out very infrequently as I'm not aware of any huge digitized databases of old photos or even newspaper microfiche. Hell, I have postage stamp-sized photos of my grandparents with people who nobody knows who they are. I don't think this tool could help me.

Logo hunting

[MosesJones]

So to test it out I grabbed a couple of logos (AIG, Slashdot, Bluesquare, Nike swoosh) and found that what it will do is find scaled down images or ones of lower quality but it won't handle significant colour shifts. So AIG for instance have a blue logo but sponsor Manchester United where their logo is displayed on a red background, the Nike swoosh I tested had a white background and all I got was basic black on white swoosh elements.

Now with photos this is less of an issue as major colour shifts are unusual but it does mean that for commercial and design art its not really as applicable.

Re:Small letters

[jacquesm]

I suggest that if you're not going read TFA and can't be bothered to do any further searching of the site you are slamming that you read this page:

http://tineye.com/terms

which specifically states the opposite of what you claim might be there.

The letters aren't that small.

Re:Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identificat

[__aarcfd8085]

it does work pretty well for example i searched for this:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/BRGPOD-WM/BRGWM-158277_72_48~The-Great-Wave-of-Kanagawa-from-the-Series-36-Views-of-Mt-Fuji-Fugaku-Sanjuokkei-Posters.jpg

it did find the actual great wave, to be true after a ton of images that had replaced the poster with other posters from the same site but it did find them which was pretty good and would be useful for research

eg if you had a section of a photo and you wanted to find the rest etc.

Re:Terms of Service:

[ciderVisor]

Already answered:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=648951&cid=24643811

Re:Funny thing, but I just shifted a bit a pixel.

[samkass]

Oh, and queue the predictable (and incorrect) responses about how you can't "steal" digital images. To steal a photo or a picture, you would have to take a physical copy belonging to someone, and deprive someone else of that physical copy, without their permission according to SlashDot, but not the English dictionary.

Pet Peeve of mine: That's not the definition of "steal". It's only the SlashDot conventional wisdom. It's really not that hard to look up words on the internet. Here's a link to a dictionary.

Steal:
1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully

Appropriate:
  3 : to take or make use of without authority or right

Re:Embedded Codes

[x2A]

"rather than a brute force pixel by pixel search"

They're blatently not pixel by pixel comparisons... look at the tech, don't listen to the woman! If it was pixel based then an image saved using two different implementations of jpeg wouldn't match up. It's probably more likely that a map of lines, shapes, patterns etc in the image is built up, and then they are what's compared. This means images that are different sizes, have different light/colouring (such as a high quality scan vs poor quality) and colour depths, but are of the same thing, can still yield results.

Err... or is that not what you meant by pixel by pixel search?

Re:Embedded Codes

[clone53421]

Well, they don't actually do a pixel-by-pixel search... they index them and create digital fingerprints, then it does a pixel-by-pixel on your "search query" image and compares its fingerprint with the fingerprints in the database. Pretty neat.

Re:Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identificat

[clone53421]

You have to login to read the FAQ. If anybody wants to avoid jumping through the hoops, here's the FAQ as a gif. Sorry about the resolution, you'll just have to pick a good zoom level...