Piracy, Pictures and Metadata

Here is a very good talk by Derek McAuley of the University of Nottingham on copyright and images:

Image Search by Example

Relevance feedback is a very useful tool to either modify or expand queries according to user needs, or to provide an example with which to start a search. The former tends to be used in text retrieval, the latter in image retrieval.

An example on the web is TinEye, provided by a company by the name of Idée.

It works by finding an exact copy of an image you specify, either via upload or via a link. It does not find near images, the result is binary - either the image matches or it doesn't. Some small differences are allow for example, searching for Mona Lisa in curlers will bring up the original version of the Mona Lisa. One interesting part of the service is that if you provide a web page, it will load the images, and allow you to click on them to conduct a search. The service is useful for tasks which require known item search - e.g. I've got this image, has someone used this before on the web, I need an original image.

(h/t: Tanya)

Monday blues cure

Here's pretty baa lambs from Google image search.

Application of Image Retrieval

Here's a description of PhotoSketch, a program which uses web search and matches shapes from user input to images retrieved from the web, in order to create composite pictures. Cool!

(h/t: David Thompson)

Eye Tracking on Search

Here's a very short example:

Show quite a complex interaction using web, navigating to image search from the results list and inspecting results from that media.

Medieval Image Retrieval

University of Cambridge provide access to a set of Medieval images, and provide commentaries on them. Basic search is - very basic.

You can choose in advanced search:
1. Media: type of painting used oil, tempura, gold and medium such as paper book.
2. Cycle: don't know what this is.
3. date: 11th to 16th Century
4: Title: of painting, any word or exact phrase.
5. Keyword: search restricted set of keywords e.g. Christ in Majesty, Evangelists, Majesty
6. Image number (if you know it).

Doesn't seem to be a full text search on the commentaries unfortunately.

Image Search by colour and example

Idee is a company that provides image search software, and they have a number of products including TinEye, which is a firefox plugin to provide query by example search for images. They provide a number of examples on various data sets (Alamy and flickr):

1. Search by colour on Alamy or flickr sets.
2. Visual search by example using an image from the Alamy set.
3. Visual search by example, using an uploaded image, either directly or using a URL on the Alamy set.

This is rather fun, enjoy! They have a blog.

Related: Hermitage museum provides similar search on their art collection, by colour and by layout, which are both great fun to use! Both provide demo's. This particular system is based on IBM's QBIC system.

(h/t: David Thompson)

Grumpy Smurf

When searching for 'grumpy smurf' on google, this is the first image I get.

LOL!

Impossible information needs for Images

Here is a video about requests for information needs which are impossible to fulfil, received by the Hulton Archive (now part of Getty Images):

(h/t The Online Photographer, via David Thompson).

Dream Search

Dreamlines takes an entered query, and does a Web image search to create a dynamically generated 'dream' from images in that hitlist, one image at a time.

This isn't a service to generate static hitlists, it creates something from your search.

The query represents you the dream you would like to have, and the dream when generated gradually changes. Its rather interesting to watch. I can't link to any generated dreams so you'll have to try it youself (I typed in 'Emma Thompson'). Occastionly a recongnisable image comes up but there are lots of dreamlike lines and blobs. Sometimes its dark, sometimes very light. Great fun!

One small think - carriage return doesn't work, you need to press the 'submit' button.

(h/t: David Thompson)

Posts in the series are available here.