Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, has a ton images available for browsing through. You can search for photos in a multitude of ways including by user, tags, title keywords, and a few more. However, it's a lot tougher to search for images by colors and not many services get it right the first time around. The Multicolr Search Lab is a fantastic tool that does an excellent job of finding great images based on the colors you select.
From the labs of the makers of the image search engine TinEye comes an extraordinary product. The Multicolr Search Lab allows users to select up to 10 colors that they would like the images they are searching for to contain. To make a color more prominent in the image search results simply select that color several times from the provided color palette. As you pick and choose your colors the search results will automatically refresh with images that represent your new color selections.
So far, the Multicolr Search lab is available for Flickr and Alamy Stock Photography. However, not every Flickr image will be searched. According to the site, they extract the colors "from 3 million "interesting" Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour."
In addition to the Multicolr Search Lab, I'd also recommend checking out the BYO Image Search Lab from Idée. The BYO or 'Bring Your Own' Image Search Lab allows you to upload an image or choose one that's available on the web and find images from Alamy with similarities such as color tones.
Both search engines are great and unique tools to make the best of. I didn't have any problems getting great matches to the colors and images that I provided. Another bonus is the use of the Flickr "Interesting" set to ensure the best quality photo results. These are two great services that we'll be sure to keep an eye on.
Comments
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Awesome
Posted by: sergiooooooo
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July 9, 2008 3:00 PM
Woaw, amazing !
Posted by: Mathieu | July 9, 2008 3:44 PM
Photos by Color
Posted by: Shelley | July 9, 2008 3:56 PM
That is just about one of the COOLEST things I have seen in the ENTIRE WEEK. Or month?
Posted by: Andy DeSoto | July 9, 2008 7:55 PM
Searching via image content is the domain of Computer Vision (dub artificial eyes), it might be new to readers here or at least new to web application, but actually the technology had been applied heavily in industrial applications over the last 10 years or so. Computer Vision discipline had existed for about 30 years.
There is a local company here in New Zealand, Compac that develops state-of-the-art industrial computer-vision-based system to sort fruits in real time according to color, ie, color-based-computer-vision-system.
In the old days, it used to be humans that do the sorting of fruits to pick the good ones thus discarding the bad ones and then pack them into cartons for shipment. This was slow and expansive, because you have to employ a platoon of human sorters. Now vision technology does it much faster and better than humans.
We're gonna see computer vision based technology increasingly used in internet application, exactly as the image retrieval application that Flickr is now adopting.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | July 10, 2008 12:41 AM
Hi Corvida,
I just posted a comment but it disappeared, perhaps into your spamfolder (there were 3 URLs on that message).
Cheers.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | July 10, 2008 12:45 AM
Check this also: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
Posted by: Andrei | July 10, 2008 4:25 AM
Yeah, the image/object retrieval at : http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
is vision-based. The user formulate a query the colored diagram or image and the system tries to match the target to similar shapes/color objects in the database that are close matched in terms of features.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | July 10, 2008 6:00 AM
wow, more cool free stuff
who is paying for it all?
and will it ever stop?
Posted by: gregory | July 10, 2008 8:53 AM
I agree with Falafulu Fisi. That technology is absolutely not a new one. I also can remember that altavista.com had similar service in the end of 90th. If you search for 'images search' or 'multimedia search', you can find much more interesting and helpful projects. Finally, what is the purpose of that finding similar colors in the arbitrary photos? What kind of a sense it brings to the searcher? Just 'red and green and blue' looks like Rorschach test for the software, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_inkblot_test .
Posted by: Alex | July 11, 2008 6:40 AM
This is not the first tool of this kind that I see that works with Flickr. Anyone knows a tool that works with www.istockphoto.com?
Posted by: DC website designer | July 11, 2008 5:17 PM