Suite of Image Search Engines from Idée

We’ve had our eye on Idée Inc. for a long time now and while it’s difficult to fathom the technology behind their search engines, they thankfully leave ample opportunity to marvel at their work.  At the core of their widening selection of products is a powerful piece of image recognition software that is able to gather a choice group of images from a number of specified criteria.  We’ve been able to play around with the services offered online and we encourage others to give it a whirl as well.  Here are three particularly impressive projects Idée is working on, all with a different spin on tracking down the desired image.

TinEye - TinEye is an image search engine driven by another linked or uploaded image.  Not only is it the first search engine of its kind, but it’s able to identify the image even if it’s been altered.  Truly fascinating stuff.

Multicolr Search Lab - Multicolr is a way to find images based on a set color palette.  The surprisingly vibrant and interesting selection of photographs is drawn from a pool of Flickr images.

Visual Search Lab - This tool is similar to Multicolr only the results are based on tags rather than colors.  It relies on almost 3 million images provided by the stock image site, Alamy.

As with all emerging search technology, the quality and scope of the results depend heavily on the size of the indexed material.  For example, TinEye currently searches over a billion images and it will be exciting to see the popularity grow as the library crawls more web images.

In addition to these fun tools, Idée offers professional services to the entertainment and news photography industry.  PixID tracks image use in other publications and is currently in use by a number of agencies.  As if this wasn’t enough already, Idée recently jumped into the mobile application fray and sends users to iTunes or Amazon after they photograph an album cover.  To learn more check out their site or follow this iTunes link.