- Happy Canada Day from TinEye
You probably did not know that TinEye was based in Canada? Yes, we call Canada our home and tomorrow is Canada Day. Happy Canada day to all our TinEye fans. Now, let’s see how much you really know about Canada and take MacLean’s little difficult Canada Quiz. Let us know your score for a chance to win a TinEye t-shirt! No cheating!
[Photograph (c) Paul Jerry]
- TinEye: new TinEye website release coming soon
While working on our next TinEye website release our product manager is losing her head!
- Open TinEye! And other stuff…
Well folks we’ve heard you loud and clear: “We don’t want to log in to use TinEye“. Good news! TinEye is now open for anyone and everyone to use, without the need to log in or register. Our registered friends – and there are almost 200,000 of you – however, will enjoy some great perks.
And there have been some other changes too!
- Registered users of TinEye will get the opportunity to try out new features first, and provide feedback. You will also be able to link to and share your search results with friends. You will also have the option to keep a search history, including a gallery of images with search dates and the number of results found. And don’t forget that registered users can subscribe to the TinEye newsletter to stay in the loop. Now would you just go and register?!
- We introduced automatic discard of search images after one hour. If you are unregistered–or if you are registered and have disabled search history in your profile–anything you upload to TinEye for search is discarded after an hour.
- We updated the TinEye plugin for FireFox to version 0.5. This update includes a bug fix where if text is highlighted with a background image beneath it, the plugin is not activated.
- The little business of ads appearing on TinEye. Well, they have arrived because little TinEye wants some fluids (especially Robot Oil and Bourbon). You want a free reverse image search engine right?
- We made improvements to search speed and you should be able to play with a faster and sharper TinEye.
Just for the new folks: TinEye is still only searching a 1 billion image index which means if you don’t find a match for your image search it is not the image recognition technology, it is the index! But now that we have this release out the door we will go back to working on the little things: like growing our index!
We appreciate your feedback so keep the kudos and love coming.
So what should you be searching for this morning? Well how about the Obama Hope image that is all the rage this morning? or the little angry baby? Happy searching folks and welcome to the future of image search brought to you by the good folks at Idée.
- Will the real Obama Hope photograph stand up?
I am sure you are wondering what does image recognition have to do with Obama? Me too! A couple of days ago – this is super old news for the blogosphere! – James Danziger posted about how he spent months searching for the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used to create his Obama Hope image. I am sure you have all seen the Obama Hope work?Reading James’ post (which I linked to a couple of days ago) I thought boy if only he had access to the image recognition we take for granted within the Ideeplex walls, his months of research could have been shortened to minutes (James, meet TinEye. TinEye meet James. Now be nice)! But I digress: upon hitting publish on my short post, I received a comment from Waldir who pointed me to a series of Flickr photograph where Stevesimula identifies another photograph as the original. Bam! Would the real Obama Hope photograph please please stand up? No really! Sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that escape you: well, champion how about using our image recognition technology and comparing all the contenders? I mean we can surely spot the fakers? That’s what we ended up doing yesterday but unfortunately I did not have time to post about it. So the results are in and the winner is: Mannie Garcia who shot Obama for the Associated Press.
Stevesimula was the first one to complete his own analysis and came to the above conclusion before we did, we basically took our sophisticated image recognition technology and confirmed his finding.
Tom over at Phillynews did an awesome detective job to locate the original Obama photograph. Read his sleuthing!
Here is what we did: we took the Obama Hope poster and matched it against the two potential source candidate images. For this we used the image comparison engine of TinEye‘s bigger, more powerful brother: PixID. If you thought TinEye can compare images, you should see what PixID can do! PixID takes a detailed look at the patterns of the pixels images, creating digital fingerprints of the source and target images. It can find a small partial match in the fingerprints, even if the images have been heavily transformed. Edits can include crops, flips, rotation, skews or as in this case – literal posterization of the image.
PixID can also calculate a sub-pixel accurate transformation matrix that shows how the images best align to each other. We used that to produce the images shown below. Basically Mannie Garcia’s photograph was the best match.
Below you can view the results. As you mouse over each poster, it will swap to the best possible alignment of the source image we compared it to. If you toggle the images back and forth, you can see the real winner is obvious.
This is the Reuters images which was initially identified by James as the correct match for the Obama Hope poster.
As you mouse over the image to the right, to toggle between the poster and the aligned photograph, you will see that the alignment seems a bit off. Clearly Obama’s head and ears do not line up well at all! So what’s going on? It turns out that the mathematically best alignment possible was to have the lips and nose line up properly (take a look and you will see that they do). If you force the head and ears to line up, then the nose and mouth will be way off. Either way this is not looking like a good match to us.
Now mousing over this image shows a different story. The alignment is near perfect. No question this is a better match. Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Unless of course there is an even better match out there!
- TinEye: the ‘go to’ search engine for images
TinEye fan Jeff left us a quick note to let us know that he spied TinEye in action over on Digg. The post in question – Awesome Spaghetti Junction, what city is this? – included the image below and the simple question:
What city is this?
How can you find out more about an image such as this one when the image is all you have? Simple. Use TinEye.com. TinEye is the only search engine able to find your exact image in over a billion images crawled from the web.
Digg user ka9dgx used TinEye to find the image in a National Geographic Traveler story about Bangkok, Thailand. TinEye also located the original image titled “The Veins of Bangkok” on Flickr, just one of the 26 different instances of this image found on the web.
And who took this shot? Trey Ratcliff, a part-time photographer that I first learned about back in August when I wrote this post about Copyright and Creative Commons. You can see more of Trey’s amazing images by visiting his blog Stuck in Customs.
Click the image below to try the TinEye search yourself and discovery where else Trey’s image has travelled online. Still need to get your TinEye account? Grab one here.
Image: Trey Ratcliff
- To pose, perchance to sleeveface…
As we mentioned last week, the sleeveface contest at the idéeplex during our TinEye Music beta release party was a ton of fun. Now it’s time to select the winners of our sleeveface-off.
To // Sleeveface // : one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.
Here’s the official “How to Sleeveface” video:
As we told our friends at the iParty, the best of the sleeveface snapshots will win a prize. Jen Dodd clearly pulled off a winning sleeveface with her Nina Hagen look below, so she’s queued up for a prize for sure.
Who else do you think deserves a little something for their sleevefacing efforts? Leave us your comments with your top two picks from the photos below and we’ll tally up the votes and award two more prizes.
Steve Jobs says “there’s one more thing…”
Alannah Myles looking fierce
Superman at the idéeplex (looking a little blurry!)
Bob Marley contemplates image search
J.Lo poses (FYI, it’s Amber!)
Sarah Palin is pro-Heineken, gosh darn it!
Okay, so those are our contestants for the prizes. But wait! I have a few more snaps for you – here are the idéalists avoiding work on a Friday afternoon by sleevefacing:
Prince gives idée the thumbs up
Lennon gets serious about image search
Lookin’ fine Barry…
Having a Sheryl Crow moment
Uhm, Leila… that‘s not *quite* right!
- That’s better!
If you are diggin’ the sleeveface you can see more on Flickr and Facebook. Even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is into sleeveface (kind of anyway).
Happy sleevefacing friends! If you try it out remember to post a link to your photos in the comments, we’d love to see them.
- They came, they saw, they installed TinEye Music…
Last night we hosted a little event here at the idéeplex to share the latest toy we are working on. We were lucky to have a great group of folks from the Toronto tech community join us to ‘kick the tires’ of our soon-to-be-released beta app for iPhone.
Thanks to everyone who came by and made the night a smashing success. It was really exciting for the team here at Idée to see TinEye Music, the first iPhone application of our visual search technology, out the door for beta testing.
With TinEye Music you use your iPhone to take a photo of any album cover. Almost instantly that snapshot gets compared to our index of over a million album covers and the app sends you right to the iTunes page for that artist where you can preview songs, buy tracks or even purchase the entire album right from your iPhone.
You can learn more about our app by watching our quick little video or reading today’s posts by Mathew Ingram and Adam Schwabe. Jevon from StartupNorth beat all of us all to the punch, however, with his TinEye Music review posted during the party.
On top of the great conversations and lots of music searching with our TinEye iPhone app, we also did a little “sleevefacing” last night. If you aren’t familiar with the term “sleeveface“, take a look at some of our guests demonstrating it here and here. Amber MacArthur channelled her inner J.Lo, Libin Pan did his best Steve Jobs pose and Jen Dodd rocked on as Nina Hagen (Jen, you win sleeveface of the night, we’ll send you your prize!). It was a lively night for all.
We have a ton of photos to share. For even more, Ben Lucier has shots of the party over on Flickr and photographer Rannie Turingan posted lots of great pics too.
This photo Rannie took of Jevon performing “the TinEye maneuver” with his iPhone is one of my favourites, followed closely by Alice’s snapshot of the other Beta at the party last night.
Well, the fun might be over but the work is not. This is just the beginning of bringing visual search to the world of mobile technology and we have a lot more in store for you, stay tuned!
** Photo: Jevon strikes a pose – Rannie Turingan
- TinEye: now searching 900 million images!
That’s right folks, we just added another 200 million images to TinEye (give or take a few million). Now you can search over 900,000,000 images in real time, comparing any image against our index of almost one billion images crawled from the web.
What does this mean for you, TinEye searcher? More matches!
Let’s try out a few example searches using the same images I used in an earlier blog post. Just a little over a month ago (when the index was a tad over 700 million images) we took a look at some well known pictures from across the web to see how many of them TinEye could find. Now we can try those searches again to see what kind of results will we get after adding almost a quarter of a billion more images to the index.
For starters, let’s try Gerard Butler and his well know shot from the movie 300. Originally we found 526 results, with our bigger index TinEye locates 672 results with some interesting new edits. Try the TinEye search.
The very popular Creation of Adam came in at 635 results last time. Now? 756. Try the TinEye search.
Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez was also a popular image, coming in at 277 results. With our updated index of over 901 million images, the Las Meninas search turns up 313 results now. Try the TinEye search.
To learn more about TinEye, the world’s first image search engine, you can read the TinEye FAQ or head over to TinEye.com and register your account to start searching right away. Don’t forget to let us know what you think.
Happy searching!
- TinEye has a keen eye for images
TinEye is certainly busy searching up a storm. It is great to see so many nifty search results and to find out how our beta image search engine is helping you locate images online. From photoshopped cows to book cover artwork, TinEye is finding amazing matches.
Here are just a few of the recent cool searches that have been submitted to us by TinEye fans from around the globe…
A search for this cow with her spots replaced by a map returns over 100 results including the original cow and the original map image.
An edited version of the popular Che photo returns another spoof version.
A search for this bunny robot on TinEye returns another robot, this time he’s the Stay Puft marshmallow man.
Here’s a snapshot of the McDonald’s logo, even on an angle TinEye can match it.
One of our fans used TinEye to locate this anonymous bike from an ad illustration. With 20 results, TinEye quickly identified the bike as a Yamaha V-Star 1300.
The folks at OpenCoffee club appear to have some have fans over at OpenBeer Club.
I came across this flower image on a designer’s website and decided to search it with TinEye. The result? An Amazon book cover.
Yep, its a tricky one! Here’s how they match up:
TinEye can find matches that will surprise you. With over 700 million images indexed (and more to come) what will you find?
- Managing your Tineye account
We’re thrilled with our growing community of TinEye fans. We’re glad to have each one of you, but we also know that sometimes folks want to delete accounts (for whatever reason) and you should be able to do that with TinEye too.
Now you can. If you need to delete your beta account just click on the profile tab in the top right corner of your browser window when signed into TinEye. The delete option is at the bottom of the profile page.
While you don’t have to tell us the reason, if you do decide TinEye’s not for you we would certainly like to hear why.
Because we’re in beta if you delete your account you’ll have to re-register and wait for your new account in order to get another. Just sayin’!
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