I am impressed with the progress that Leila, Paul and gang at Idée Inc. are making on TinEye. Yesterday, they released an IE browser plugin for TinEye. This follows their Firefox plugin and nicely rounds out the offering.
One example is you’re looking at purchasing a stock image to use on your homepage, and iStockPhoto.com says the image has been download 11,337 times, but you want to know where it appears online. You can use TinEye to find where the image has appeared. Check out what Rick has to say about the power of TinEye.
Lessons for you? Suck up to Leila and Paul. Check out the software they are building and run a check on the stock photography you are using; you never know who else is doing the same voodoo as you.
Voodoo! TinEye is like speculative fiction, that is, it meets Clarke’s Third Law.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Idee has built a great base technology for doing visual search in very large image collections. They have built a strong business around image and video monitoring. You can think of this services as a compliance and monitoring service. They help clients by providing right management and tracking. The monitoring reports provide clients a snapshot of where their images have appeared. The reports are used to automate editorial photo sales, perform competitive analysis, and copyright monitoring of collections.
Idée monitors and actively tracks millions of clients images and can identify where their clients images have been used in both print publications and the internet. They are the only company in the world to do this. Their image recognition system analyzes each client’s images and creates a digital fingerprint for each image and compares it to images scanned from publications and crawled from the Internet. The image matches found for their clients can be partial image matches as well. This means that a person appearing in one image, and then reappearing in another image but with a different background, will be found by Idée. – Jevon MacDonald on StarupNorth
TinEye is a diversification of the existing Idée technologies. Leila and Paul are trying to figure out the power of visual search.