This study was conducted in 2009 for a company that is “working in the online social media sector and are looking for an accurate image analysis solution that allows us to compare a reference photo to a large dataset of photos to determine if the reference photo is duplicated in the larger dataset.”

The full title of the report is “Image-to-image search with Pixcavator (PxSearch): a case study”. It was written by Dr. Ash Pahwa and myself and is presented here with minor modifications.

The first version of PxSearch was created in 2007. Using that version, initially the search results with the collection had 4-5 good hits (i.e., the transformed version of the original) at the top and then some bad hits. Some of the good matches weren’t even visible. After the upgrades, the results became 10 out of 10 or close. This improvement made this, more extensive, study possible. The results are OK, even though the collections are still very small. The company eventually went with another vendor, it’s still an interesting document to browse through.

Since 2009, there has been no work going on but, hopefully, this project will be one of the summer projects for the REU site.

Incidentally, I don’t like the term “reverse image search” popularized by TinEye. If the image search that we are used to at Google etc is “direct image search” (text-to-image) then the “reverse image search” is supposed to search for text based on images. Not only this isn’t what we are talking about, but also the problem hasn’t been even remotely solved (see this pathetic list: Visual image search engines). This is the reason I prefer “image-to-image search” to describe this application.