There are times when a picture speaks a thousand words. But you can’t find keywords to describe it. Here, Reverse Image Search comes to the rescue: it’s a special type of search that uses images instead of keywords and retrieves similar images.
The general term that covers the definition of reverse image search is Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). The fun is playing around with it. The inverted image search is useful if you’re trying to recognize faces or identify objects. Think you’re looking for a piece of furniture similar to the one you have in the photo. Describing it with keywords is practically impossible. Expand it and you can search for art, architecture, places, etc. Another important use might be to search for your copyrighted images being used by others.
Of course, the success of any search lies in the search engine’s index. These are early days, but reverse image search engines are evolving rapidly.
Here are two for you to try:
Google – Search by image
Google is the keyword in the search. Image search gives you superior image search capabilities. Just drag ‘and’ drop an image into the search box. This is a recent addition to Google Image Search and it is still being rolled out.
You can also upload an image from your desktop or paste the image’s URL into the search box.
Results reflect related or similar images with different sizes and resolutions. The accuracy of the results will increase if the image used is a famous image.
Here’s what Google says:
Google uses computer vision techniques to match your images to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate “best guess” text description of your image, as well as find other images with the same content as your search image. Your search results page may show results for that text description as well as related images.
Browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox are also available to speed up your search.
TinEye
Google probably took cues from this early start in reverse image search. TinEye is a reverse image search engine that has managed to hold up against the competition. Its strong (and rising) 2 billion index could be one of the reasons. Again, you can search by uploading or copy-pasting the image URL.
The search is pretty quick; it gives you the source of the image, compares modified images and checks if larger versions are available. The free version of TinEye allows you to do 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches per week.
TinEye also has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Plug-ins allow you to right-click on any image on a web page and perform a reverse image search. If your browser doesn’t support browser extensions, TinEye covers it with a bookmarklet that sends the image URL to the reverse search engine.
The best news with reverse image search is that you don’t have to guess, worry about spelling, or type anymore. Do your own reverse image search and let us know about the results.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
