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

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

[apathy maybe]

The least significant bit of each pixel. Oh, and now it appears that this tool doesn't work. (At least, I would suggest it isn't that good, I could be wrong. The article appears to suggest that it is that good, if you can take a photo on your phone of a painting, and then find an article on that painting...)

Oh well, I guess people still haven't learnt that the old ways of copyright are only hanging on through inertia.

Oh, and queue the predictable (and correct) 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. (And the word "steal" doesn't appear to appear in the article, added to provoke page views I guess.)

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

[4D6963]

The least significant bit of each pixel. Oh, and now it appears that this tool doesn't work.

Yeah, how about you just watch the video on their website before suggesting that what they do would be as retarded as comparing the values of each pixel. It's surely closer to cross correlation, meaning it's nothing like comparing pixel values but more like correlating the image's space-frequency components.

By the way, does anyone have any clue what information they store and compare? They obviously don't cross correlate your search image with every image in their index every time you search, so what could they possibly store that would allow them to correlate images?

Re:Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identificat

[Speare]

"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."

I think in this context, it's pretty obvious that the software's not trying to discover who people are, or who shot the photograph. It's the researchers who use this tool. If you have one website without attribution or other names, and you search for other pages, you might find a different page that has the same image along with more information.