Búsqueda de imágenes en Flickr por color o parecidos | Comparando pí­xeles | retrievr

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

What?

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images. If you’d like to have your images (or the images for a specific tag) added, please let me know. A submission interface is planned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does it actually work?

Yes! That is, it depends. (Mainly on your expectations!)

In my experience, the results are usually fairly good, sometimes even stunning – considering the artistic sophistication most of us are able to come up with (gallery forthcoming); and in the cases they’re not so stellar, they are at least entertaining ;-) But clearly, the approach has its limits.

One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn’t do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you’re drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won’t get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c.

It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.

Another thing to know is that there’s currently no way to specify the aspect ratio, so you have to rescale the image in your head (things that are close to the borders of the image you’re thinking of should be close to the borders of your sketches), but that’s really more of a missing feature of the drawing flashlet than an inherent problem. Sometimes it also helps to remove detail instead of adding it.

Personally, I see retrievr more as an «exploration» tool than as a «search» tool, and it seems to work very well for that.

retrievr is based on research conducted by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington: Fast Multiresolution Image Querying (1995).¹

I first came across the algorithm when someone (I think Edd Dumbill) linked to imgSeek a couple of years back; imgSeek is a standalone image management application that incorporates that algorithm as well.

retrievr is a new implementation in pure Python (and a host of great libraries: Fredrik Lundh’s PIL and aggdraw as well as numarray). The frontend has been created using Helma and Macromedia Flash.

We’ll continue to work on enhancing retrievr as well as a host of other applications. Stay tuned and watch this space!

w! Please help us rate sketches for The Art of retrievr! Only a million to go …Still new! You can search by uploading images now as well. Also: Your sketches have URLs! Send ‘em around.

This is an experimental service. Please treat it nicely and send copious amounts of feedback! For some background, read here.

retrievr relies on parts of the System One platform.

retrievr – search by sketch / search by image:

1diseñador queriendo ser programador:

una nueva forma de buscar fotos, ah! y desarrollado en Flash