Posts
This week, Google unveiled an odd but interesting new feature of its image search capabilities. Similar Images lets the user look for images that are visually close to a target image without being exactly the same. Playing around with the tool lets you see just how far the science of "computer vision" has come. Fundamentally, digital images are nothing more than patterns of lines and colors -- but Google has somehow taught its search engine to look at those patterns and decide which images a human would consider similar.
Try typing in "ferrari." The engine will return a page of listings, many of which have a "similar images" link below them. If you find one you like, you can click it, and be returned a page of images that are startlingly similar without being identical.
This is neat for Ferrari 360 fans who like to surf through pages and pages of car photos. But, in general, there aren't many reasons why you'd want to have a few hundred pictures of the same thing.
That's why it's better to think of the similar image search as a way to find similar things, rather than similar pictures of the same thing. If you're shopping for diamond rings, for example ...
click here to read the full article
0 comments:
Post a Comment