- Color search to make you smile!
It has been a busy few months in the TinEye HQ!
Our TinEye APIs are finally out of the oven and ready to take for a spin – we will talk about these another time – as today I would like to tell you about one API: MulticolorEngine. This is one of our favorite APIs and once you have played with it, you will join our fans!
Of course we are biased but we believe that MulticolorEngine is very likely the best color search engine in the world :)
Some of you may remember that a while ago we released a color search lab. It was our playground to use our color search technologies and figure out all the kinks of a color search API before we introduce it to the world. We basically sat down and ate our own dog food to wrap up development of our color search API. This new color search lab is powered by our new MuticolorEngine API. And you will get a pretty good feel for what this API by visiting and playing with the new lab.
The color search lab searches a 10 million creative commons image collection from Flickr. Of course you could integrate the MulticolorEngine API with any image collection and search it by one or more colors.
Now let’s step you through searching by color in our lab.
Let’s start by picking a single color. Summer green! (we made the color name up by the way!):
Nice color right?But what if you felt like a little orange? in addition to the green?
And how about some yellow to enhance that summer green and orange?
Neat? But what if you wanted less green and more orange? Well you would simply need to move up the color dividers and presto!
See how our color distribution changed:
From:
To:
There are a few ways to alter the color combinations you have selected: by using the slider and just changing the percentage of color in each color selection or by simply adding more of a single color. If for example you had a green and orange combination and you wanted to see what would happen if you added more of the same orange: all you would have to do is add more orange and continue until the desired results start showing up.
Continue adding colors to your selection and MulticolorEngine will continue fetching the images that contain your color selection.
But suppose you no longer love your orange color selection?
Just click on the trash can and it is gone.
But now let’s say you don’t like the current shade of red you have selected. We have a solution for that as well – we know how attached people are to very specific colors! Click on the color wheel icon to bring up a full color wheel and select your desired color.
Change the red and get a new set of results:
As with any new release, there are still lots of enhancements and features we would like to add and we would appreciate your feedback.
Got a few minutes, well, play! and let us know what you think before we get to polishing this release.And oh, one last thing: we have heard that sometimes you have a color code and would like to search for exactly that color, without going through an interface. Well you can do that via the page’s URL:
Notice the above highlighted code? That’s a hex color code and you can alter it to whatever hex RGB code you like!
MulticolorEngine: hand crafted in Toronto (Canada) by the TinEye team and a lot of caffeine (and sometimes beer).
- MulticolorEngine: a color search API!
It is finally here!
MulticolorEngine, the API powering our color search lab is now released. You have probably already played with our released color search lab and already experienced addictive color searching but if you haven’t, give it a whirl today. In our lab, you can search a 10 million image collection by colors. Not just one color!
And let us know what you think. Would love your comments.
And if you need a handy dandy little guide for color searching using the lab, we’ve got that too!
What’s exciting today is that our color lab is now completely powered by our MulticolorEngine API – which (drum roll) has now been fully productized and is available for licensing.
MulticolorEngine = Search by colors in API form
Our MulticolorEngine API can be integrated with any image search collection to allow user to search images by colors. Well suited for e-commerce and image centric website and requiring no technology infrastructure changes, this API’s features include:
- A color indexer that extracts and indexes all the colors in a collection of images. No manual tagging/keywording of colors is required.
- The ability to search using one or more colors, or to search for images matching the color palette in another image.
- A color palette generator which will find all the colors present in a single image, or a collection of images. Using this feature you could display all the colors you have available in sofas, chairs and tables, and then let a user filter their search to only display green chairs.
- Support for structured meta-data search. Allowing you to build interfaces that can, for example, find all products priced less then $50.00, in the ‘shoe’ category that most closely match a particular shade of yellow.
- Arbitrary meta-data searching. So if you have multiple collections, tags, and prices, these attributes can be searched for along with up to 5 colors.
- Support to provide a count of the number of products you have that match a particular color, allowing users to easily browse your collection by color. For example you could let users know that you have 32 different varieties of red, 16 yellow, and 66 black shoes for sale.
- Easy integration with your existing search technologies and development infrastructure.
- The ability to ignore solid or transparent backgrounds in images. This is critical for product images where the background of the image should not be considered a color during a product search.
Right now, you probably need to stop reading and head over to the lab to start color searching!
In addition to our MulticolorEngine API and the color search lab, we thought it would be fun to build a little lab around one of our API feature: the ability to extract colors from an image. This new lab takes your image and gives you a color list or color palette. It will display a color palette for all the colors identified in your image. Color extraction works for JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. Colors are displayed in RGB or HEX values. Give it a try. We would love your feedback. This of course is just one of the many features included in the MulticolorEngine API.
And that’s not all: how about shopping for shoes by colors?oh well, for that you will need to wait until next week when we release a little Zappos lab that will allow you to search products by colors!
With this API release, we are excited to continue building our vision for an integrated image recognition platform. So please stay tuned for more API releases and news in the coming weeks. MulticolorEngine is brought to you by the tiny TinEye team. If you are interested in bringing more image search and recognition goodness to the world, join us. We are hiring.
MulticolorEngine was built with love and caffeine in Toronto (Canada).
And if you would like to find out more about MulticlorEngine here is all you need:
- Details and pricing
- Documentation
- Color Search and Extract Color Lab
Happy searching!
- Preview: the spanking new TinEye APIs
I am sure you have noticed that we have been quiet on the TinEye front for a few months now. That’s because we have been busy building our TinEye APIs and also “dog fooding” our APIs. Oh I see you are not familiar with one of our favourite expressions? Eating your own dog food? Well, we have been eating our own dog food. By that we mean using our own APIs to build internal applications which of course led us to find that they needed much improvements prior to release! But improve we did, and we are ready to preview them at last!
But let’s start with a little addition for TinEye – the tiny reverse image search with a tiny 2 billion (but growing!) image index.
Drag and drop: now you can drag and drop an image onto the search page to start a TinEye search. Handy!
And now on to what we are very excited to introduce: TinEye Services.
These are a series of APIs that allow you to add image recognition to your application, enterprise or operations. In addition to the TinEye Commercial API which we previously launched, you can now license and start working with 3 additional APIs:
MatchEngine: Finds duplicate, modified, and even derivative images in your own image collection. You can think of this API as a TinEye on steroids, but working with your own images. It deals with even more extreme image modifications then TinEye. MatchEngine is fast, extremely accurate, and easy to integrate. It of course uses image recognition and image recognition only for its image search and comparison.
MobileEngine: Build mobile application that use high-sensitivity image recognition. This is the API to integrate in any application where you want users to be able to search by taking a picture with their mobile phone camera. Why use QR codes when you can use image recognition? MobileEngine has been optimized for mobile images and is extremely fast, accurate, and a snap to integrate.
MulticolorEngine: Search through your image collection using colors. You are probably familiar with this API as it powers our multicolor search lab. Now, you can have MulticolorEngine index your image collection so that you can search it by color. Want an image that contains blue, yellow and green? MulticolorEngine can do that. This API is not limited to just a single search color, it allows you to select multiple colors as well as the weight of each color in your search. And it does not stop at that: MulticolorEngine can extract colors from an image, or set of images, and it supports full metadata searching too.
Happy searching!
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