TinEye : The New Image Search Engine helping Ferret Out Copyright Ripoffs

You know how it goes - you want to find a photo of the Mona Lisa, so you go onto Google Images, you type in Mona Lisa, and you get hundreds of results. But what if you have an image, and you want to find out what it is of? Or what if you want to find out where else on the world wide interwebs this image is used? Cue Idee's Tineye.com, an image search engine.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine that is very easy to use. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in TinEye’s index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

Let's take it for a spin...

A website that proclaims that it "does for images what Google does for text", is not going out of its way to hide its ambitions, but this is the claim that meets the internet surfer that lands on Tineye.com. Simply put, Tineye.com consists of a search engine which asks you to upload a picture or provide a link to an image. You can also install a plug-in for FireFox which allows you to right click an image and choose Tineye search from the dropdown menu.

Start a search, and Tineye.com will find how many times this picture has been represented on the internet - a feat accomplished by comparing images pixel-by-pixel, and creates a so-called "digital fingerprint" for each image found, determining which pictures are similar to the one you searched for.

The process is supposed to work even through the image is cropped, resized or photoshopped. Problems arise if the image is changed too drastically, relies on an outline, or changes the colour scheme too much.

The website itself raises a few warning flags that not all is well in the state of TinEyemark - most notably its limited search index. At the time of the introductory video, there were a little less than 500 million images in the search index, meaning that the image you have uploaded is only compared to a fraction of the pictures available on the internet - by the time we got to the site, there were just over 900 million images, and the company behind Tineye.com is aiming at entering billions more.

I tired to search a iPhone picture and got 4977 results around the web. Impressive !!! Have a look at screenshot :


According to the TinEye FAQ, the search engine uses "sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms" to analyze an image pixel-by-pixel, and creates a fingerprint from it. From there, it searches across the web for other images that are similar to your image's fingerprint, and can even identify images that have been cropped, watermarked, or altered (to some degree). In order to search, you must either upload an image or point the engine to a URL of one. You can also use a browser bookmarklet or extension, which will let you hit a button any time you want to use TinEye to search for other images like the ones on the page you're looking at.

So.. What's the point?

Ultimately, we were left wondering what the use of this website might be. Google is fine for finding information which you do not already have. If you already have the picture on your desktop, or you have the link to it on a website, you clearly will not need to find the same identical picture again.

What it might be useful for is for photographers to find whether their pictures are being used in contravention of copyright. (and for that to be the case, the search index needs to be significantly larger).

As a concept, Tineye is pretty nifty technology, but how often have you found yourself wondering 'hey, that's a nifty picture, I wonder what it is of'? For me, that'd be 'never', which sort of ruins the point a bit...

Conclusion

Overall, we liked TinEye. Our opinion of the site transformed from skeptical to impressed as we used it more and more. It's obviously not meant for casual web browsing or finding out what that crazy animal you saw on the side of the road is. However, if you are trying to keep track of how your creations are used across the web, or you saw an image and want to find out where it came from, TinEye is incredibly useful. As it continues to index more pages—the company claims it's already indexing hundreds of millions more per month—TinEye could eventually turn into a popular tool.

[ Visit TinEye ]