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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."
"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.
My work here is dung.
that the real purpose for this is to find the rest of sets ;)
Butt sex?
even automagically - just add some random minor alteration to pixels in statistically homogeneous sections of your foto
will kick off an interesting 'watermarking' cold war
will also help to stem casual piracy but fair use for teh win!!1
how is this news on a day when pervez musharraf has resigned anyway - get some priorities!!1
Images can also have an embedded code, i.e. steganography, which could possibly be used to speed up searching. This would allow the web crawler to know exactly which part of the image to look at to determine if it matches the key the crawler is looking for, rather than a brute force pixel by pixel search.
Why not link to the Flickr page for the photo?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64795408@N00/2771811957/
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.)
I wank in the shower.
That sounds like a great idea... from here --> forward (for those who start the steganography). Of course, being able to search without embedding extra stuff is more useful... still, more speed is better.
I have not read TFA so I don't know any details. But I would be really careful using this, what if there are some small letters somewhere on the site saying "by uploading this, we get all the rights...idiot".
"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.
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Interesting for the big boys, but not so much for the amateur or even professional freelance photographer.
What are you going to do if someone ripped your pics from Flickr and claims them? Exactly -- not much.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
What would be really cool is if you could upload a transparent 1x1 pixel image and it returns every image on the internet
Yes
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The idea of a "visual" search has been around for some time. These guys at the Univ of Oxford
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/vgoogle/index.html
showed the first working system, using around 10,000 images. They were able to search for repeating objects such as Bill Muarray's tie in the film Groundhog Day. In broad terms, these systems work by identifying "visual words" which are small, recognisable, patches in the images. A "vocabulary" is built up by clustering these visual words, reducing their number from perhaps several hundred per image, to a few thousand in total. Each image is now characterised by which of the visual words apprea within it. Traditional reverse-index techniques used in text retrieval can be applied directly, resulting in rapid query times.
This system is very impressive because they have managed to really increase the scale that they can create the vocab.
I should create a page for movies and mp3s too, a place were directors and producers can upload their content to see if anyone has copied it already!
I've had this idea for two years and never acted upon it. Here are my notes from brainstorming:
Great idea for an application of an Engine that searches image by using an Image.
"Epic Sauce.com" be able to search an image by using an image
- Using a face / recognition matching engine
- Using a pattern recognition matching engine
All is not lost. I can still extend this idea further by finding ways to match Graphics Interchange Format.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
This is a good start and definally has the obvious applications. Hopefully, if this is successful, i.e. people use it, work on more complex systems can be created.
It would be really neat to find pictures with a certain symbol on them or even my face.
does this detect hidden images in images as well?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
By using Idée's TinEye website you signify your agreement to the following terms and conditions, which may be updated by us from time to time without notice to you.
Submission of pornographic or illegal files is strictly prohibited. Do not submit any file that can be construed as pornography or is in violation of any law.
No porn searches?
Failure to comply with these terms may result in termination of your TinEye account at any time, without prior notice and at Idée's sole discretion.
Ahhh.... okay.... don't search for porn, or we might not let you search for more porn from that particular account. Gotchya. Hehe.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
> Visual Search Engine Tracks Stolen Images
But using an image made by another person is NOT theft. Copyright infringement maybe, but not theft.
This is great news! At long last, technology exists that will allow me to find the rest of that series with the rehea...
I mean, find out who is stealing my photographs!
http://www.vizseek.com/
If you're going to track where a photo came from, I'd expect a timestamp to be useful.
This brings to mind an interesting question; guys like RMS, and even our own IdontBelieveInImaginaryProperty here at slashdot like to rail about how copyright is basically a scam, a crime against the public because it restricts "sharing".
Photos are copyrighted too. If this tech were for tracking copyrighted MP3's, there'd be howls of indignation here. It'll be interesting to see the reaction on the copyright side of the argument. If we don't see the standard "this is anti-freedom" arguments, it'll be interesting to ask if photos are somehow more worthy of copyright protection than movies, games, or songs.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
Now what would be handy would be if it could somehow sort them chronologically (maybe using the metadata, or maybe if the server will give the date-modified on the picture...). That would reduce the amount of searching if you knew you were going for the oldest known copy, e.g. you wanted to know where it originally came from + whatever info there was about the picture that might not be quoted elsewhere.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This simple algorithm can be done with ~50 lines of python code using the Image and numpy modules. It's immune to rotation, scaling, and slight color manipulation or other small changes. Makes me wonder why they use pixel-by-pixel comparison.
the 80's called and want their password scheme back
How the hell am I supposed to know what their company considers pornography? Can I search for The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse?
The company is based in Toronto rather than some ultra-conservative U.S. state; that gives me an epsilon more confidence the company won't take the "nudity = pornography" stance. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a search equivalent to a risqué ad campaign in Europe would get you banned.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I read in the dev notes that the next version will finally be able to find Waldo.
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...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
My guess is that idée is bought by the end of the year.
How is it redundant when this is the first person to say it?
Anyone who tries to hide behind a pseudonym but posts photos of themselves is now outed by this thing. The first such tools were used by forensic researchers to catch criminals.
I tried searching by uploading 2 images from my machine. One is also on craigslist and the other on photobucket. It didn't find either.
Can you provide a permalink to your searches with the shifted pixel and without? (Just copy the url in the address bar)
You'd need to move a *lot* of pixels to make it not work.
- shazow
"Software piracy is not theft!" is painted on the walls around here, but this program tracks down "stolen images".
Steps 1 and 2 of your plan are not the easiest things in the world. Chances are if you've managed Step 1, someone else has already done Step 2 and is merrily working on Step 3.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I think it'll still work for for most copyright violations. Web comics in particular could benefit a lot from this. I see unattributed comics floating around on the net all the time. This would be a nice way to allow the owners to at least contact those people and ask to be given credit.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
i can't wait till they implement a DMCA notice-bot and start shutting down every single *chan, every single image mashup community, deviantart, etc. with false positives, and the identification of those patterns within larger images.
The "free speech for sale" cover art comes to mind.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
My robots.txt excludes access to my huge collection of images.
So, either one can prevent discovery by this tool in a very simple way, or it ignores robots.txt. Which is it?
Ok, let's pretend I put a portfolio online like on the deviantart website. If someone wants to use one the digital art available on this website and not get caught by TinEye, I guess he just have change the color balance a bit...
Maybe I'm still not completely awake, but I can't seem to see anything other than a login form. Do we need to be a registered user to use this search engine? Or is it because of its beta status?
... if you ban the search engine in your robots.txt ?
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of DeviantArt users suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. At least, I hope they're silenced. This might help fill in gaps outside of some astute fan pointing out the half dozen or so "artists" claiming stolen images as their own.
You mean my unpublished Perma-Alpha site that uses these for spacing could get slashdotted? Hooray!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
TinEye - they might have gotten the name from the Brandon Sanderson series "Mistborn" where tineyes are 'magicians' who have enhanced senses. They can see/find/feel things through the use of 'tin' (and there are other abilities that somewhat relate to a 'web' of connections).
mu
It's a tool, you tool. However you want to use it is up to you.
Perhaps they can link it up from one of these and get it to track stolen fruit and vegetables? ;)
To do a similar search, I went to images.google.com and searched for "japanese painting wave" because I figured that would be the most obvious keywords you could use f you don't know anything about the painting except what you see. The first hit tells the name and the painter without needing to chug through lots of results.
No doubt Perfect 10 and their ilk will be huge users of this service.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Okay, I'll ask the obvious question. If you just have a shot of a great pair of boobs, can this service find the woman and ask her out for you?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
now its gonna be so much easy to search my fav p0rn star pics.
Eclipse PDE and Me
I found quite a different result. I nabbed an old photoshopped pic I did a few years ago, and uploaded it. TinEye came back with two results, being the two source images from the photos. That's impressed the hell out of me.
Gatesfeld search results
For the full size photoshopped version, Gatesfeld if you want to try the search yourselves.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Hopefully they will get with the times and update their plugin.
Instead of reading a dictionary to get the definition of stealing, how about reading the law.
If you're accused of copyright infringnment (a civil matter, so far), you won't be charged with theft (a criminal act).
Blonde, Brunette, Redhead...
Run Jeff Goldblum! The aliens are coming!
...who said buttsex?
This seems like a good time to promote my new open source project, pHash. It is a perceptual hash library under the GPLv3 that will eventually be able to do all the things this commercial service does. Please join if you have DSP, digital imaging experience or strong mathematics background. We could use more volunteers!
Anyone else feel another Google acquisition coming on?
As a matter of fact, I am creating digital things and plan to give them away for free. I also plan to ask for donations, because it has cost me considerably to create these things.
If this doesn't work, it may be simply because people don't like my work or didn't hear about it. But I do need to make back my initial costs to make more stuff, or I simply won't be able to afford it. All I'm saying is that consumers should consider this when they decide whether to get something free or pay for it. It may be in your self-interest to pay.
I suggested this in April.
Currently at work and stupid firewalls so cant check the site :(
One issue I've noticed mentioned on deviantArt is the riping of artworks and reposting them on other sites. Just wondering how well this tool would help with finding those sorts of misappropriations?
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
I tried a search of an image of the Moon that I took. I got 89 results of which one was mine and the rest weren't. I wonder what would happen if one of those other 88 people were a litigious bastard.
http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2008/07/tineye-oh-my.html
I'm a bit disappointed cause i tried to post that info weeks ago and /. rejected it..
Idée TinEye: Querying by images? Friday July 11, @02:22PM Rejected
Maybe it's not the same TinEye?
. .. ... ....
MAh...
True there are much quicker ways when there are obvious keywords but if you had, say the mona lisa what words could you use? but tin eye got it from this http://www.monalisarevealed.com/assets/images/Mona_Lisa_3_copy.jpg after one page (all of which were the same image)
at the moment its not too good but it looks like it one day will be quite powerful.
User-agent: TinEye/1.1 (http://tineye.com/crawler.html)
disallow: /