
Reverse image search engine - wave
http://tineye.com/
======
ruby_roo
Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and
have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its
context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc.

I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these
lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and
finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical
appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than
that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if
they have pics of you as well!

<tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you
want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other
folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to
see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing
moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were
too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now.
With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking
your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of
you from the cloud? :O </tangent>

Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being
particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their
copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were
comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-
tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to
have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice."

:)

~~~
blasdel
You can "untag" yourself from other people's facebook photos.

~~~
thwarted
Aka "opt-out". Which is why privacy is dead: who's going to be able to keep up
with that, especially when other people have no problem tagging you if you
know about the picture or not.

~~~
blasdel
When they tag you in a picture you get a notification -- it's how someone
implicitly 'tells you' about a picture they have of you.

~~~
thwarted
Assuming you're on the system they are doing the tagging on (it's easy when
it's just Facebook, but a photo could be tagged on Flickr with your real name
and you'd never know), and you check your email (or whatever method of
notification they provide), and a host of other things that put more work on
those who are trying to control their exposure. That's the problem with opt-
out, and that's why thinking you can maintain your privacy by monitoring what
other people do is folly.

~~~
blasdel
If the image tag on Facebook isn't linked to your profile, there's no way for
anyone to find it, unless they were friends with the poster and browsed to the
photo.

Flickr is more public, but they don't do any user-graph linking at all, the
photo annotations are plain text. I don't think the annotations are even
exposed to google.

------
palish
Finally, a practical way to find out the names of porn actresses.

~~~
cdr
Actually, through reading internet minicelbrity TheFerrett, I know there are
extensive forums dedicated to that. I suspect the forums still win.

~~~
palish
Haha, no way. Links?

Your Mechanical Turk mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify
_this_ porn actress...

~~~
blasdel
It's a common subject of threads on imageboards (4chan et.al.). People ask for
"sauce" (the source of an image), and for MOAR.

~~~
freakball
There is also [this](<http://iqdb.org/>).

~~~
minitrollster
You aren't on reddit, freakball.

~~~
patio11
Looking at the start of this thread I can see how he might have gotten
confused.

~~~
freakball
Mr. Face, meet Mr. Palm.

------
patio11
Their crawler could use some work. (I uploaded my PR screenshot of my
software. They flagged several copies which are domains 301 redirected to my
homepage.)

The algorithm, however, is beyond awesome. They found half a dozen instances
of my screenshot on the Internet, including my site, some download sites, and
a Chinese pirate or two who had gone to the trouble of watermarking my image.

I think Getty just had kittens.

------
shader
This works really well.

For some cool examples, check out <http://tineye.com/cool_searches>

Also, I recommend that you click the "compare images link" under each result
image after you perform a search, to see which part it matched.

I've used tineye several times, and it's found the sources of heavily
photoshopped images before. They've done a great job.

------
aminuit
From the FAQ:

    
    
      TinEye was created by Idée Inc. Idée develops advanced
      image identification and visual search software for photo
      wire agencies, stock photography firms, entertainment media
      companies and some of the world's leading imaging firms
      including Adobe Systems Inc.
    

In other words, yes they intend for it to be used by content owners to find
unauthorized use of their IP on the web. On the other hand, they claim to
respect robots.txt and give their crawler name on the same page.

~~~
ambition
Well, Idée is an established business that already does the IP search service.
This is a new service, but not necessarily for the same purpose.

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entelarust
this works pretty well, try this stock image out:
[http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/...](http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3709313/2/istockphoto_3709313-young-
caring-doctor.jpg)

if you browse the results, it even finds the image's use in
formatted/manipulated graphics

------
anamax
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508387>

~~~
pixcavator
This isn't as impressive because there is no search. And by the way, neither
can recognize rotated images.

~~~
anamax
> This isn't as impressive because there is no search.

Search is a service built on matching and indexing.

------
andrewl-hn
I was waiting for a service like this for years. I actually haven't thought
it's even possible. Thanks!

~~~
palish
I have an idea for how to do a better reverse image search engine. The problem
with this one is that it only matches exact images. But what if it was
possible to match against any feature within the source image, rather than the
exact, entire source image you search for?

For each image in the index, break it up into 4x4 tiles, then store a hash
code for each tile. Then repeat the process, but offset the boundary of each
tile by 1px along the X axis. Repeat 2 more times. Then, for each offset along
the X axis, offset down along the Y axis. So you store 16 hashes per 4x4 pixel
area.

Now, when someone searches for an image, repeat that hashing algorithm for the
source image. The results page then returns any image that contains a 4x4 tile
that is also contained in the source image, ranked by the number of tiles
within the image that is common between the source and result image.

The end result is that you can see how the features within an image are used
in other images -- so if someone takes the red stapler from Office Space (
<http://www.yunasville.com/img/102005/milton.jpg> ) and puts it into a
different image, and you search for that red stapler, the results page will
still return the photoshopped image, because it'll match the 4x4 tiles on the
stapler in both images.

I've explained this in a convoluted way, but hopefully I've communicated the
essence of the idea.

On one hand, there will be more results to filter through, and it's more
computationally expensive. But that's fine, the image results are still ranked
effectively. On the other hand, it's more computationally expensive.

~~~
crux_
? really ?

First, looking at the examples, it doesn't seem to be restricted to exact
images, not by a long shot.

Second, your approach is hopelessly naive. ;) Consider: rescaling, re-encoding
using a lossy image format, color adjustments, and so on.

Good news though, I bet your approach is way, way, _less_ computationally
expensive than whatever it is they are doing ;)

(My guess would be something like SIFT or SURF, probably minus (some) rotation
invariance to speed things up, combined with a whole bunch of hackery to make
the feature database search suitably fast while still acceptably accurate.
Worth your time to google + read up as those algorithms can achieve positive
red stapler identification fairly robustly, but you'll be in for rather a lot
of math.)

~~~
pixcavator
Thanks for the tip about the technology - the company does not say anything,

------
habibur
From the site after a 0 match result: "TinEye looks for the specific image you
uploaded, not the content of the image. TinEye cannot identify people or
objects in an image."

So it's not what some of us might have been afraid of.

------
staunch
A good sample image URL: <http://ycombinator.com/images/yc500.gif>

Very impressive work. I can't think of any real need for it myself, but it is
cool.

~~~
varun
It definitely is awesome. Just tweeted the founder of this Toronto-based
startup for some comments from her in this discussion.

------
motoko
This service didn't work for me, but I'm voting it up in hopes that attention
will help this startup as I'd like it to someday.

~~~
dc2k08
Nor me when I found it a couple of months ago and I needed such a service. I
wanted to source the true manufacturer of a product and all I was finding at
the time were a lot of traders who were using the same official product
photos. I think it will improve though and the web needs it.

------
Keyframe
I remember thinking about a service like this but for audio - for example you
post a link to youtube video or some similar service and it would match audio
in video with a song name. That would be pretty cool and useful.

------
jpwagner
Now would be the time to take down copywritten images from your blog/etc...

~~~
quizbiz
As a photographer I must say that istockphoto and the non licensed (the proper
term escapes me) images on flickr give bloggers and web designers no excuses.

~~~
slig
creative commons licensed

------
globalrev
OK one use of this is to check for your copyrighted photos obv.

But will people pay for such a service?

There are just so many companies starting with seemingly no way to make money.

~~~
mustpax
Content owners pay a lot of money to protect their content. They pay money to
lawyers, lobbyists, and companies like Media Sentry to snoop in on P2P
traffic.

It's not a stretch to say they will pay to find stolen images. I'd venture
they'd pay pretty well too.

