About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

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Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

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Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

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Software for determining image similarity?

This is a lazyweb request -- I'm looking for something but I don't even know if it exists. I have about 200 photos (headshots) and I'd like to make an animation that runs through them in order of, for lack of a better term, visual similarity. I'm not talking about morphing or just fading between the images in arbitrary order. Is there software out there that, given a reference image and a set of images to select from, can choose the most similar image? Open source would be best, as there's no budget for this, and command-line-only is fine, but I am on a Mac.

Friday, September 15th, 2006
design + fun + programming
5 comments

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• Comment from Franco.fiorese , 1 day later

Not exactly what you are looking for but, if you do not already know it, try to see at imgSeek (written in Python):

http://www.imgseek.net/

Regards
Franco

• Comment from Paul , 1 day later

That looks great, thanks!

• Comment from Jamie Stephens , 2 days later

This is only vaguely related. There is a project that does exactly this with geospatial imagery. You give it an image and it will search sattelite imagery from around the globe to find a match. Unfortunately, it is only available to the U.S governement right now. Here's a demo clip:

http://syndicatemizzou.org/media/show/47

• Comment from Paul , 2 days later

That's cool, too, thanks.

I had a chance to try out imgSeek -- once I installed Qt/Mac -- and it's pretty amazing. The command-line tool is absolutely usable for the purpose I have in mind. Now to find the time...

• Comment from Brett Spurrier , 3 years later

I wrote a small image similarity library for the iphone. I run it with my iPhone AppStore app called eyeBuy which compares an image against a database of more than 5 million (and growing). So your 200 would be a breeze.

I posted an SDK at: http://sites.google.com/site/imagecomparison/
and could compile it into an OSX library is there is interest. Email me at brett dot spurrier at gmail.com.