August 26, 2011

Tineye is a reverse-image search engine. Given an image, it can find other similar images. I have been wondering how to write my own "tineye" program, but was unsure where to start.

Luckily, I found a very informative article on one method of reverse image searching. The article shows how to recognize images based on a hash by reducing the image to an 8x8 image, converting to grayscale, and 'hashing' the image.

The algorithm was posted to hackerfactor.com. This algorithm does not appear to be the same as Tineye's algorithm (which can find images-inside-of-images) but proved to be a simple and efficient solution to the reverse-image-searching problem.