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 ;)
"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.
[
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!
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?
You just got troll'd!
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
E pluribus unum
"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
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.