Nathan

Technology, Tips, Web Sightings

Similar Search has officially graduated from Google Labs. If only searching for images back then was this simple, school life would’ve been a lot easier. Seeing this Google milestone, I remember those days when our projects were about image processing and image retrieval. Now, it’s all so simple. Just head on to Google Image Search and try it out for yourself.

The image of Obama to the left was a result of a search on the keyword “Obama.” I then searched for similar images using the second picture on the top row (colored portrait) and the first picture on the second row (black and white portrait), by clicking Find Similar Images, for comparison. The results are shown below:

It’s pretty amazing to see that the colors are taken into account, as well as the pose. It’s interesting to note how the algorithm works. Of course, they wouldn’t be flaunting their algorithm anywhere, so I can only speculate. It’s probably a good mix of both image processing techniques (using color and shapes) and using tags that are commonly used in describing the images.

From the link I shared earlier (officially graduated from Google Labs), you can see more examples of how the search works on pyramids, actual maps, etc.

Side Note: Bing vs. Google

Bing Image Search also has this functionality, although the algorithm used is quite different. Based from initial comparisons, Google factors in the color and the shape of the object more, while Bing factors the “relevance” of the tag or search query to the image. I’ve not tested it fully, so feel free to contradict my observation. Maybe we could have a good discussion thread for this. Comment away!

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