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:

Happy searching!