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March 10, 2006

Visual Image Search

I just came across Tiltomo, a new visual search engine (thanks to a posting on Silicon Beat). Most visual search methods are based on color histograms, so they are good for finding similar color schemes to a reference image (eg roses, sunsets). This one also lets you constrain the search by the "theme" of a reference image (without having to specify the theme yourself). The homepage has a nice demo using images from Flickr. I did a search for the tag "spider" and got lots of great spider images. Then I selected one of them, with a close-up of a spider in a web, and got many more similar ones to that. For other searches, I found it easy to get collections of photos of people's eyes, stuffed animals wearing stripey costumes, and of course, swimming suits.

I did find myself wondering about how much human effort was involved in preparing the data for use with the service, and how that would scale up. The system seemed almost too good at knowing which photos were of people vs. animals, men vs. women, and using this information to find related photos.

While I'm writing about visual search, check out AHOP2, which lets you do find websites based on aesthetic style. It's a good way to look for furniture that might go well in a modern house, for example.

Down the line, I know of several companies that will be bringing visual object recognition into search. That's a topic for a later post.

Posted by barney at March 10, 2006 6:19 PM

This entry was posted in the following categories: Search

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Comments

May I congratulate you on the use of the term "swimming suit" rather than "swim suit"? Recent years have seen a decline in the use of the present participle; thus, spell checking, advertising spend, and wait lists. On behalf of all those present, I thank you.

Posted by: animoose [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 12, 2006 1:49 PM

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