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Visual Search Engine Tracks Stolen Images
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Aug 18, 2008 08:04 AM
from the get-your-eyes-off-my-graphics dept.
from the get-your-eyes-off-my-graphics dept.
Barence writes "A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel-by-pixel search across the internet, flagging all instances of that image even if it's been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way. It's not just for copyright enforcement though; 'it's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos.' It's currently in beta, but you can try it out."
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Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identification (Score:5, Informative)
"it's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos."
This may be nitpicking but I read the FAQ and it does not, in fact, claim to be able to accomplish this unless that exact same 'old photo' is posted elsewhere on the internet:
Can TinEye find alterations of a query image?
Yes. As long as they are alterations of the same query image, TinEye can find them and include them in your search results.
Note that search results are ordered by 'relevance' (i.e. how well the result images match your query image), so image alterations are typically found at the end of your search results.
How does TinEye work?
TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks.
TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.
So this example they list of the soldier must rely on the fact that the website contained the same exact image that the people had of the old soldier they were looking for. I can't expect it to take any image of Person A and return every single image (past & present) of that person. That's ridiculous.
I would expect that to work out very infrequently as I'm not aware of any huge digitized databases of old photos or even newspaper microfiche. Hell, I have postage stamp-sized photos of my grandparents with people who nobody knows who they are. I don't think this tool could help me.
Re:Kind of Misleading on the Old Photo Identificat (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos."
I think in this context, it's pretty obvious that the software's not trying to discover who people are, or who shot the photograph. It's the researchers who use this tool. If you have one website without attribution or other names, and you search for other pages, you might find a different page that has the same image along with more information.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
it does work pretty well for example i searched for this:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/BRGPOD-WM/BRGWM-158277_72_48~The-Great-Wave-of-Kanagawa-from-the-Series-36-Views-of-Mt-Fuji-Fugaku-Sanjuokkei-Posters.jpg [allposters.com]
it did find the actual great wave, to be true after a ton of images that had replaced the poster with other posters from the same site but it did find them which was pretty good and would be useful for research
eg if you had a section of a photo and you wanted to find the rest etc.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now what would be handy would be if it could somehow sort them chronologically (maybe using the metadata, or maybe if the server will give the date-modified on the picture...). That would reduce the amount of searching if you knew you were going for the oldest known copy, e.g. you wanted to know where it originally came from + whatever info there was about the picture that might not be quoted elsewhere.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You have to login to read the FAQ. If anybody wants to avoid jumping through the hoops, here's the FAQ as a gif [imageshack.us]. Sorry about the resolution, you'll just have to pick a good zoom level...
I think everybody understands... (Score:5, Funny)
that the real purpose for this is to find the rest of sets ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Embedded Codes (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately... (Score:2)
Re:Embedded Codes (Score:5, Informative)
"rather than a brute force pixel by pixel search"
They're blatently not pixel by pixel comparisons... look at the tech, don't listen to the woman! If it was pixel based then an image saved using two different implementations of jpeg wouldn't match up. It's probably more likely that a map of lines, shapes, patterns etc in the image is built up, and then they are what's compared. This means images that are different sizes, have different light/colouring (such as a high quality scan vs poor quality) and colour depths, but are of the same thing, can still yield results.
Err... or is that not what you meant by pixel by pixel search?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, they don't actually do a pixel-by-pixel search... they index them and create digital fingerprints, then it does a pixel-by-pixel on your "search query" image and compares its fingerprint with the fingerprints in the database. Pretty neat.
Funny thing, but I just shifted a bit a pixel. (Score:3, Insightful)
The least significant bit of each pixel. Oh, and now it appears that this tool doesn't work. (At least, I would suggest it isn't that good, I could be wrong. The article appears to suggest that it is that good, if you can take a photo on your phone of a painting, and then find an article on that painting...)
Oh well, I guess people still haven't learnt that the old ways of copyright are only hanging on through inertia.
Oh, and queue the predictable (and correct) responses about how you can't "steal" digital images. To steal a photo or a picture, you would have to take a physical copy belonging to someone, and deprive someone else of that physical copy, without their permission. (And the word "steal" doesn't appear to appear in the article, added to provoke page views I guess.)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh well, I guess people still haven't learnt that the old ways of copyright are only hanging on through inertia.
This.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and queue the predictable (and correct) responses about how you can't "steal" digital images.
Pedantically, you are correct, but you that's about as far as it goes.
You can pass off someone else's work as your own. You can deprive them of income, and make income off images that you do not have permission to use. Is that better phrasing?
Re: (Score:2)
People who violate copyright don't understand the "theft of labor" part, but it doesn't really matter as we know they are hiding behind excuse that simply because they are the greed ones who don't want to pay someone else for their work.
Oh, sure... we'll get the "try before you buy" types complaining, but how does that apply to a photograph?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, there is a difference, but it's a moot point - both works required your time and labor to create, the book obviously takes a LOT longer to create, yet a book, a paperback, sells for a tiny fraction of the cost of a well crafted, hand-made chair.
You focus on the one completely irrelevant part of the discussion: the time spent creating the book vs. the chair. It's completely irrelevant because "book" is not essential to this discussion. You can replace "book" with any other copyrighted creation, including one that took about 1 minute to "create".
Copyright only makes fabulously wealthy (by and large) those artists who have created compelling material... enough so that many people are willing to purchase, at a fraction of the cost it took to make the original product, the work of the artist. They're buying labor and talent and skill, which is the same thing you're buying when you buy a hand-made chair (I'd hope, anyway, as hand-made furniture tends to be quite expensive).
Not really, not any more. These days advertising and exposure has a lot more to do with it than how "compelling" the material is.
No, you're paying for the labor, skill, and talent... and people who put more effort, skill, and talent into their creations are rightfully awarded with more than those who put little effort into their work.
No, you're paying for the advertising. For an example, there's lots of bands o
Re:Funny thing, but I just shifted a bit a pixel. (Score:5, Insightful)
The least significant bit of each pixel. Oh, and now it appears that this tool doesn't work.
Yeah, how about you just watch the video on their website before suggesting that what they do would be as retarded as comparing the values of each pixel. It's surely closer to cross correlation, meaning it's nothing like comparing pixel values but more like correlating the image's space-frequency components.
By the way, does anyone have any clue what information they store and compare? They obviously don't cross correlate your search image with every image in their index every time you search, so what could they possibly store that would allow them to correlate images?
Parent
Re:Funny thing, but I just shifted a bit a pixel. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and queue the predictable (and incorrect) responses about how you can't "steal" digital images. To steal a photo or a picture, you would have to take a physical copy belonging to someone, and deprive someone else of that physical copy, without their permission according to SlashDot, but not the English dictionary.
Pet Peeve of mine: That's not the definition of "steal". It's only the SlashDot conventional wisdom. It's really not that hard to look up words on the internet. Here's a link to a dictionary [m-w.com].
Steal:
1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Appropriate:
3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The linked page doesn't say anything about 'steal/stolen'... neither does the lil intro video clip on the linked page. Looks like slashdot headline that talks about that. Equivalent would be to describe the Google search engine as a tool for tracking people who have stolen text from your website... it's hardly an all round view of what the thing does, is meant for, or is mostly used for (which is obviously porn).
Re: (Score:2)
According to the FAQ, it's still able to identify pictures that have been colour adjusted, cropped, and even sometimes if it has been slightly rotated or had text added (or missing).
This impressed me... (Score:5, Interesting)
I found quite a different result. I nabbed an old photoshopped pic I did a few years ago, and uploaded it. TinEye came back with two results, being the two source images from the photos. That's impressed the hell out of me.
Gatesfeld search results [danamania.com]
For the full size photoshopped version, Gatesfeld [danamania.com] if you want to try the search yourselves.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Directly under his post I guess, assuming you're using a threaded or chronological view of posts.
(But yes, you beat me to it)
Interesting for the big boys... (Score:2)
Interesting for the big boys, but not so much for the amateur or even professional freelance photographer.
What are you going to do if someone ripped your pics from Flickr and claims them? Exactly -- not much.
Re: (Score:2)
Send them a cease and desist letter, and then sue them, just like the big boys?
Presumably if your someone who actually cares enough to check and see if someone is copying your photo, your also someone who cared enough to have it documented when / where you took it, or at the very least that you actually took it. Or as applied to art... you have the original copy.
seems like its not a difficult case to win...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I hadn't thought of it that way before, but you're right, f**k it, lets shut the internet down and stop developing any technologies that can't be used to stop people ripping your pics from flickr. You're so right that there's no one else in the world who's interested in developing image recognition algorithms for anything other than protecting their snaps on flickr.
gugh
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah and get a whole lot of melons :-)
What would be really cool (Score:5, Funny)
What would be really cool is if you could upload a transparent 1x1 pixel image and it returns every image on the internet
Yes
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be even cooler is if you could search for transparent 1x1 pixels.
Re: (Score:2)
When I was a kid, we didn't have image search engines! We had to make our OWN transparent 1x1 pixel images! Kids these days...
Logo hunting (Score:5, Informative)
So to test it out I grabbed a couple of logos (AIG, Slashdot, Bluesquare, Nike swoosh) and found that what it will do is find scaled down images or ones of lower quality but it won't handle significant colour shifts. So AIG for instance have a blue logo but sponsor Manchester United where their logo is displayed on a red background, the Nike swoosh I tested had a white background and all I got was basic black on white swoosh elements.
Now with photos this is less of an issue as major colour shifts are unusual but it does mean that for commercial and design art its not really as applicable.
What a great idea (Score:4, Funny)
Good Start (Score:2)
This is a good start and definally has the obvious applications. Hopefully, if this is successful, i.e. people use it, work on more complex systems can be created.
It would be really neat to find pictures with a certain symbol on them or even my face.
well (Score:2)
does this detect hidden images in images as well?
Terms of Service: (Score:3, Funny)
By using Idée's TinEye website you signify your agreement to the following terms and conditions, which may be updated by us from time to time without notice to you.
Submission of pornographic or illegal files is strictly prohibited. Do not submit any file that can be construed as pornography or is in violation of any law.
No porn searches?
Failure to comply with these terms may result in termination of your TinEye account at any time, without prior notice and at Idée's sole discretion.
Ahhh.... okay.... don't search for porn, or we might not let you search for more porn from that particular account. Gotchya. Hehe.
-
Re: (Score:2)
out of curiosity:
Why do you want to search for Pr0n you already have?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=648951&cid=24643811 [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I dare you to upload a picture of a peach.
What is pornography? (Score:4, Interesting)
How the hell am I supposed to know what their company considers pornography? Can I search for The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse? [artquotes.net]
The company is based in Toronto rather than some ultra-conservative U.S. state; that gives me an epsilon more confidence the company won't take the "nudity = pornography" stance. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a search equivalent to a risqué ad campaign in Europe would get you banned.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Search by Text, 2D, 3D, or even Doodles! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm missing the file date (Score:2)
If you're going to track where a photo came from, I'd expect a timestamp to be useful.
So is this a crime against freedom? (Score:2)
This brings to mind an interesting question; guys like RMS, and even our own IdontBelieveInImaginaryProperty here at slashdot like to rail about how copyright is basically a scam, a crime against the public because it restricts "sharing".
Photos are copyrighted too. If this tech were for tracking copyrighted MP3's, there'd be howls of indignation here. It'll be interesting to see the reaction on the copyright side of the argument. If we don't see the standard "this is anti-freedom" arguments, it'll be intere
robots.txt (Score:3, Interesting)
My robots.txt excludes access to my huge collection of images.
So, either one can prevent discovery by this tool in a very simple way, or it ignores robots.txt. Which is it?
Re:Small letters (Score:5, Informative)
I suggest that if you're not going read TFA and can't be bothered to do any further searching of the site you are slamming that you read this page:
http://tineye.com/terms [tineye.com]
which specifically states the opposite of what you claim might be there.
The letters aren't that small.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
better off if trying to escape it slicing images up into tiny squares and rearranging them in a table grid or something... it seems to be able to recognise slight differences in the image well enough.
Re: (Score:2)
What about cropping?
Re: (Score:2)
That's one case of the idea being worth nothing, the implementation being everything. Sometimes it's the other way around, it depends.
Can't wait till Google buys these guys though.
Million dollar ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Steps 1 and 2 of your plan are n