
Show HN: Search icons visually - yantrams
http://compute.vision/nouns/index.html
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andai
It knows what a face looks like!
[https://i.imgur.com/wA1iQ7T.png](https://i.imgur.com/wA1iQ7T.png)

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smnscu
It didn't do so well on my most used Slack emoji
[http://imgs.fyi/img/78s9.png](http://imgs.fyi/img/78s9.png)

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yantrams
Ah yes. This has to do with the thresholding 'bug' I discovered sometime ago.
I will update the algorithm soon. Happens with color images in the
preprocessing stage during the conversion of query image to a binary image,
especially in images with flat/palette colours.

I eventually came up with a contrived set of heuristics to tackle this problem
as you can see in the example below and managed to get more get accurate
thresholding more than 90% of the times for pathological cases like these with
the right set of weights. ---
[https://imgur.com/a/XMhdnjH](https://imgur.com/a/XMhdnjH)

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yantrams
Author here. Happy to answer any questions, hear feedback.

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soneca
I spent some time confused by the animated running horse and how it was
supposed to be related with the other icons. Until I found out that it was the
loading gif.

I would change there for something more standard.

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dessant
I found the running horse to be an adoring touch. The author's site is also
worth checking out: [http://linkdot.link](http://linkdot.link)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Gardner_at_a_Gallop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Gardner_at_a_Gallop)

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soneca
I believe if it would be both adorable and more easily understandable if it
was a smaller image, giving a visual hint that is fulfills the role of an
icon, not a featured image

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amyboyd
I tried with 2 icons I custom created.
[https://imgur.com/a/ZtseO8j](https://imgur.com/a/ZtseO8j)

The first one (the arrow into the door) seems to have worked well for the
first three 'similar icons'.

The second one (remove user) didn't work at all. Maybe because it is circled.

In both cases, half the similar icons are 'download' icons, and I can kind of
see why for the first case but not at all for the second case.

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yantrams
I suspect it has to do with the lower resolution. I'm using nearest neighbors
interpolation for resizing images and have noticed similar behaviour before.
Would be great if you can try with higher resolution versions(preferably >
200px) of the same images and let me know the results.

A closer inspection of the results actually shows some of the results aren't
that bad a match. Results ordered 1, 4, 5, 7 and 7 in particular vaguely have
the same outline as that of the query image. If I have to score this result, I
wouldn't give it more than a 3 out of 10 for sure.

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amyboyd
I just realised the "download" icons aren't meant to be "similar icons"...
they allow you to download the one above. Doh!

I've re-tried the "remove user" one but uploaded an SVG instead of a PNG (so
technically the resolution is unlimited). Uploaded it both circled and not
circled.

Here are the results:
[https://imgur.com/a/OT8Spjt](https://imgur.com/a/OT8Spjt)

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yantrams
:) Please feel free to share the SVGs. I will convert them to PNGs and test
them out. I will add SVG support real soon. Right now I've put an exception
handler that passes an empty array as query if an image format that can't be
decoded is thrown at it :|

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amyboyd
Sure - is your email yantrams@linkdot.link? If you don't want to post your
email publicly, can you email amy@amyboyd.co.uk and I'll reply with both SVGs
+ PNGs.

I actually uploaded SVGs so I think you might already (unintentionally)
support SVGs?

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system2
No results were shown after: reddit, google, ycombinator. Your site is not
secure. (SSL) There is a broken-image sign after search and no warning.

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yantrams
If you are referring to entering those words in the searchbox, yes I should've
put in some warnings/checks there to enter a valid image URL. Will fix it
soon. And yes I should make the site secure too. Thanks for letting me know.

PS: You can explore company logos here
[http://compute.vision/brands/index.html](http://compute.vision/brands/index.html)
. It's implemented using an older iteration of the algorithm and performance
isn't that great compared to the one used with the icons database.

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ilrwbwrkhv
super cool man... great use of telugu and other iconography.. you are a
cultural icon in the digital space...

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yantrams
Glad you liked it and wow are you sure you are not confusing me with someone
else ? :) I have a suspicion you are mistaking with Anil Battula from
[http://sovietbooksintelugu.blogspot.com/](http://sovietbooksintelugu.blogspot.com/)
maybe.

Speaking of Telugu, I recently got hold of a treasure trove(about 700GB) of
scanned copies of Telugu magazines and newspapers some of them as old as 1880!
Gonna upload them on archive.org very soon.

