

Show HN: Type in a search to find the average of the first 50 image results - sherril8
http://imgessence.com
When you search for something, it pulls the first 50 image results from Bing Image Search then blends them all together. The resulting image is produced by taking the mean color value of each pixel across all of the images.
======
tlarkworthy
This is prime territory for PCA and eigenimages
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface>

~~~
sherril8
By the end of the week I should have an option to search for faces only. The
Bing API makes that pretty easy to do.

------
jordn
This is (surprisingly) very cool! Some of these results could easily be hung
on a wall.

I'd love it if you could add some sort of crude voting system, so that the
good ones rise to the top.

~~~
sherril8
I am definitely looking into adding a voting system. For now, I wanted to keep
the site as simple as possible.

------
ColinWright
So, just pull and average. No attempt to align, no attempt to decompose, no
attempt at PCA, no processing at all. Just pull and average.

I'm struggling to see why this is interesting.

 _Added in edit: Rather than just downvoting, perhaps you could tell my why
this is interesting. Were there technical challenges to overcome? If so -
what? What did the implementor learn by doing this? What are you learning by
using it? Please - help me to see why this is at all interesting! I genuinely
don't understand._

~~~
DanielStraight
To the extent that it is interesting, I think it is in large part precisely
because of the simplicity. It's doing the simplest thing that could possibly
work (where work is defined as create an interesting image which in some sense
is interpretable as the "essence" of the search), and surprisingly, even with
such a simple approach it does work in many cases. See the results for Rolex
(<http://imgessence.com/browse/view/1543>). It's very watch-y, even without
any processing.

If you try to judge it more as art than tech, it's more interesting I think.

------
pawelwentpawel
This is a really cool project, good job!

Spoon is an interesting example : <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/190> \-
You can see the many basic outlines of a 'spoony' shape. However, all of those
images of spoon are presenting the object rotated at some more or less random
angles. It would be interesting to add some algorithm that would try to match
the images (rotate / scale) to the average and hence give less noisy output.

~~~
simba-hiiipower
i actually kind of like that it doesn't attempt to rotate/scale to an
average.. this way you get a rough sense of the most common orientations.

in this case the images with the spoon 'head' to top-right look to be most
common (darkest/most defined). but the next most common orientations appear to
be where the spoon is flipped with the head aligned somewhere between top and
middle left, and with many more variations..

------
BrechtVds
Apple in apple: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/370>

------
bromagosa
These are the best ones I've managed to create so far:

Circle: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/329>

Benzene: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/303>

Nike logo: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/299>

~~~
TuringTest
Shoe: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/114>

Face: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/29>

Spirit: <http://imgessence.com/browse/view/510>

It works best on symmetric, concrete objects.

<http://imgessence.com/browse>

------
drucken
" _Oh no! Server Error: 500 (Internal Server Error)_ "

This is the problem with services this fun to play with. Here at HN we break
our toys!

~~~
sherril8
Oops, looks like this happened after I went to sleep. Hopefully there werent
too many issues for people.

------
jstanley
Looks pretty cool, but can anyone explain why this is so slow?

Is it this slow even if only one person is using it at a time?

~~~
sherril8
I threw this together so quickly that I didnt honestly do much benchmarking. I
will be trying to improve performance as much as I can. It does only pull high
res photos from Bing. Which in itself, takes around 1 minute over CURL (longer
if it gets hung up on a heavy file). The image processing takes another minute
or two usually.

------
freefrancisco
searched for "boobs", total fail :-(

~~~
LancerSykera
I'm currently working on "small tits asian" as my first search.

