Ask HN: How to build an image search service?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34616583

by mgl • 3 years ago

11 8 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What are the modern and practical image hashing algorithms which can be used to build an image search engine from scratch?

agencies• 3 years ago

Here's a write-up from a relatively small/personal perspective

https://blog.qwertyforce.dev/posts/similar_image_search

goodSteveramos• 3 years ago

Take a look at SIFT and SURF for reverse image search or image comparison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_tran...

If you want to search with a natural language description then you will need to tag your images or use object detection to generate tags.

dropbox_miner• 3 years ago

Don't do image hashing please. Do this:

1. Get CLIP embeddings for text & images 2. Put them in a vector database (Pinecone.io or something similar)

It's unreasonably effective. Checkout this search engine: https://same.energy/

gk1• 3 years ago

Thanks for mentioning Pinecone. We have several resources that might be helpful:

1. Ebook on image search using AI: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/image-search/

2. Article on using OpenAI CLIP: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/clip/

3. Example code for an image search app: https://docs.pinecone.io/docs/image-similarity-search

jeadie• 3 years ago

I'd take a look at the open source project https://github.com/marqo-ai/marqo instead. It does 1 and 2 out of the box. You can use CLIP or any model you want really.

james-revisoai• 3 years ago

Here are the types of images your users might be searching for:

Examples of a class of objects - say "Lion" - your best friend is CLIP, trained on captions and naturally weighted towards popular images.

Conceptual ideas, abstract levels - 'Beautiful painting' - CLIP is ok here, but it's not really optimised for that and most 'beautiful paintings' are not labelled as such, but rather something like 'Glowing fields of joy'. Fear not, Conceptual-CLIP has your back! It can nab these.

Diagrams/slides/technical/things with text - Your SOL beyond word match, tbh. If your image doesn't have words, maybe OCR it?

Pictures of specific things like people or logos - to "find similar" you'll want to embed old style image features like corners, SIFT features etc. Note that an iceberg with a clear sky is identical to a desert with a clear sky to this approach.

joshxyz• 3 years ago

https://vector.dev/

Edit: i think i mean https://milvus.io/

https://milvus.io/docs/image_similarity_search.md

kacperlukawski• 3 years ago

Let me share an article I wrote: https://medium.com/@lukawskikacper/how-to-implement-a-visual... It uses Qdrant and ResNet embeddings to do that. Sources are included if you want to go straight to the implementation.

Qdrant is a Rust-based vector database: https://qdrant.tech/ According to benchmarks that's the fastest vector DB available.

Ask HN: How to build an image search service?

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