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Q: Searching similar looking images on the net ( No Answer,   1 Comment )
Question  
Subject: Searching similar looking images on the net
Category: Computers > Internet
Asked by: chefbackman-ga
List Price: $5.00
Posted: 16 Feb 2005 07:06 PST
Expires: 18 Mar 2005 07:06 PST
Question ID: 475428
Is there a way to search for similar looking or identical images on
the web? In a case where there are no similarities in file name, date,
or similar information.

Like giving Google a picture as a search term instead of a text input.

Thank you!
Answer  
There is no answer at this time.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Searching similar looking images on the net
From: willcodeforfood-ga on 03 Mar 2005 14:14 PST
 
The short version of the answer is no, there is no way to do what you
suggest and likely will not be for a long time.

These sorts of problems are known to be so difficult for computers,
they are used to tell humans and computers apart.  For more
information on this subject see: http://www.captcha.net/

But to address your question specifically:

1. searching for similar images

To compare two images for similarity involves a plethora of very
difficult computing problems.  Computer science is sufficient for
determining if two images are of similar brightness, shading, hue, and
so forth.  Beyond this, computers are pretty much useless given the
state of computing science today.  Even seemingly simple problems like
determining if an image contains an object (person, ball, bridge,
etc.) is very hard and tend to consume lots of computing poser to
solve.  Keep in mind this is a simple yes/no test (i.e. does the image
contain a ball, yes or no) and it's another order of magnitude more
difficult to get the computer to determine what the image contains
(i.e. decide this image contains a ball and a bridge).  Even assuming
you could get some software to process an image and determine the
contents of the image, you'd then be left with the difficult problem
of deciding what does similarity mean with regards to these contents. 
Humans see a car and immediately understand it's used to get from one
place to another.  Finding these sorts of implicit relationships is
yet another incredibly hard computing problem.  Even asking for an
image using "transportation" as a keyword and getting back a search
result including a file named "car.gif" is a very complicated problem.
 Most search engines will use text placed around the image to
extrapolate the content, but anything beyond that is a very hard
problem.


2. searching for same images

Most search engines that catalog images do obtain the image dimensions
but I've found none that allow you to use that as a criteria for
limiting your search.  If any did, that's as far as you'd get--
finding images of the same exact size.  If someone copied your image
and cropped off one row of pixels, however, you'd never find your
image that way.  If any search engines start measuring each image's
average brightness, hue, etc. then you'd be able to search for images
that matched with regard to that characteristic.  Even so, someone
could alter your image by editing it slightly enough that the eye
can't tell, but the search engine would mistake it as a different
image.  Maybe with a combination of such parameters, you might be able
to search for images that were almost an exact copy of yours, but
that's about the best you'd get.

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