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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. 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.

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by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

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
+ +
4 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...

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