Today early morning(10:30 A.M eh?), when I woke up, google reader dumped few interested bits along with regular crap. One of them is from TechCrunch. It said there is some new image search engine called TinEye, by Idée Inc, searching images, as images. got it, huh? It also said it's in private beta and hence could only be accessed by approved invites. There is an offer saying first 500 readers of that news will get that privilege by sending a mail. so did I and got it! By evening, I got approved and started testing it. btw, read about TinEye to have a clear idea. It seems to search for modification of 'identical' images and not similar images. but even that's a good job if done, well.

I started off with my own image, so curious I'm to see if I'm so famous :P -- no results! I asked why? and it said it only searches a small fraction (450,000,000 or so) of images on the web. I took Mahatma's image and gave it few modifications like..

• rotated it 3, 5, 8, 10, 15 degrees to observe that it is 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 0% successful respectively.
• gave it gaussian, motion blurs to see it's 80% successful in both the cases.
• erased alternate rows, it works.
• added few light flares and introduces few fancy filters GIMP provides, it still works.

few of the images tested can be seen here..

[gallery]

So, I would, as a person who's just been into the world of computer vision, say it's doing a good job. The execution time is very very impressive. For such a huge database(it may be a fraction on the web, but it's huge), retrieval times are really impressive. But it would be really nice if it were 'similar' instead of 'identical'. I know that it's much more challenging than the current task, but still I wish so.

If CVITians who are working for CBIR(Content Based Image Retrieval), a bigger goal, could say something about this and also about their won work, that would be great.

BTW, If you are really interested in trying it out and couldn't wait until approved, contact me at gopal [AT] tidbits [DOT] co [DOT] in, I'll share my account, if only I'm sure you will not screw me.