Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
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.
"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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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
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.
MP3 Search Engine
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!
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.
http://www.vizseek.com/
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.
"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?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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.
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!
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?
Interesting for the big boys, but not so much for the amateur or even professional freelance photographer.
How does this NOT help the small photographers? It's exactly those guys who don't have the resources to find people using their content.
What are you going to do if someone ripped your pics from Flickr and claims them? Exactly -- not much.
Are you saying then when someone steals your image you have no recourse available? With this site you can find who's using it. What you do about it is up to you. And content owners do have recourse. They can contact whoever's using their content and let them know they're in trouble, then offer to work out a solution.
For example, a small food service business asks a printing company to make them a menu. The printing company steals images and uses them. The business owner doesn't know anything about this. Now, if the content owner finds out he can contact the printing company and demand either back payment or that they cease using the image. As a copyright owner the photographer can also send legal threats. Most of these are clear cut cases. And if the only place your images are online are on your portfolio sites, then thieves have no excuse by saying "Well, we tried to identify the owner, but couldn't".
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.