
Multicolor image search - runn1ng
http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr
======
dhotson
I helped build a similar tool at 99designs. I blogged a bit about how we built
it here: [http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-
explore...](http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explorer/)

It uses R-trees to index colors in the Lab color space to do fast perceptual
nearest neighbour color search.

We open sourced the code behind it too, so you can implement search by color
type features on your own set of images:

<https://github.com/99designs/colorific> \- for extracting colors from images

<https://github.com/dhotson/colordb> \- for doing fast perceptual nearest
neighbour color search

~~~
bliker
very nice and simple, thank you

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dsr12
This message is displayed when you try to search for more than 5 colours :)

"In accordance with common sense, decency, propriety, sobriety, and the
Revised Search Limitations Act of 1742, we respectfully inform you, our dear
user, that the number of colours searched upon must not exceed 5. Thank you
for your cooperation."

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anigbrowl
I did not expect much from this - perhaps the same image with different color
filters or somesuch. I'm pleasantly surprised: this is an ass-kicking tool and
should be converted into a Photoshop plugin post-haste. And it has a sense of
humor too. Very impressed!

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franze
shameless plug: i recently completely rewrote "Google Search by Drawing" from
scratch -> <http://search-by-drawing.fullstackoptimization.com/>

on github <https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/search-by> (MIT license)

the reason for the complete rewrite / V2 is shameful. the first version was
deployed to heroku in 2011, then i never touched it again. last month i
deployed a minor change to the fron-end html (of the old version
<https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/searchbydrawing>), deployed to heroku
again, the app crashed if you clicked on "search", it crashed silently. i
tried to debug it on heroku (pain in the a __) as it worked perfectly on my
local setup.... after a wasted weekend i rewrote the whole thing in half a day
(now EC2 hosted). shameless plug story end.

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steeve
Allow me to point you guys to a project we did 4 years ago at the Exalead labs
that does just that: <http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com/>

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nwh
Unfortunately, this is another in a long line of websites that die if you nuke
Google Analytics. It's becoming a persistent problem.

~~~
coderdude
Curious, so I looked. I figured they fire off tracking events when you click
on the color swatches and yes, they do:
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/labs/flickr');".

I'm assuming you have JS enabled but have analytics domains blocked? Might be
a good idea for site owners to start wrapping these pageTracker calls in
try/catch statements.

~~~
nwh
I'm using Ghostery to block the load of the Javascript, and I imagine a few
other HN readers do too. It's strange that they never considered that the GA
tracking events might fail.

~~~
shabble
Recent versions of Ghostery (and NoScript) both provide 'surrogate scripts' to
replace common JS resources that are expected to work by the active page.

You can see the noscript[1] ones at about:config (search for
noscript.surrogate.*) but I'm not sure where the Ghostery ones live, or if it
has specific ones for different trackers, or just a generic handler.

[1] GA replacement code appears to be (reformatted):

    
    
        (
        function(){
            var _0 = function(){
                return _0;
            };
        
            _0.__noSuchMethod__=_0;
        
            with (window) urchinTracker=_0, _gaq={
                __noSuchMethod__: _0,
                push:function(f){
                    if(typeof f=='function') f()
                },
                _link:function(h){
                    if(h) location.href=h
                },
                _linkByPost:function(){ return true },
                _getLinkerUrl:function(u){ return u },
                _trackEvent:_0
            }, _gat={
                __noSuchMethod__:function(){ return _gaq }
            }
        }
        )()

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blahbap
This is a great tool for designing web pages, but I'd like to be able to
filter on licence types; I'm not so interested in images I cannot use in my
web page.

~~~
xentronium
They claim all the images are CC:

> We extracted the colors from 10 million _Creative Commons_ images on Flickr

~~~
pre
But not all CC licenses are the same. Anything with NC isn't usable on a site
with adverts.

So it'd be nice to have some checkboxes for the Creative Commons license
types. Include/exclude Commercial, Derivatives, Attribution.

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sfx
This is fantasic! And kind of addictive. I used to use Tineye regularly for
backwards-image search until Google unveiled their own. It's awesome to see
that Tineye is still innovating. I hope we see more products from these guys
in the future.

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est
Is this a fast index to 10 million histograms with a json output?

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neya
Can anyone think of a nice Web-App idea that could implement this?

I was thinking, instead of having this as a raw search engine (which is
nothing short of EXCELLENT!), maybe you could use it to find foods that looks
alike? Something, maybe?

Come on guys, I know you're much more creative than me :)

~~~
nicholassmith
Off the top of my head, and it's not great, but you could use it to select
colours for an outfit and have it return a selection of clothing that matches
the colour range provided.

~~~
neya
Actually, it's a pretty slick idea mate! If you had a good marketing team, you
could target big studios with this one :D

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SagelyGuru
This is really nice but the colours are somewhat artificial, thus the
selections are somewhat biased towards man made images. I suggest using
smaples of colours from real images, such as real skin, sea, sand etc.

~~~
cuppster
Do you mean that the algo sorts on decreasing color frequency? i.e. you choose
"blue" then the top results are images that are literally all "blue".

Usually when I want an image with a specific color, I don't want the entire
image to be that color...

~~~
hmbg
I get what you're saying. Maybe you could throw in a lower bound of the hue
variation of the image as a parameter into the search to find "natural
looking" images but with prominent fields of the desired color.

