"Self-plagiarism is style"

Michael Stephens = Norman Bates?!?

1st February 2007

Michael Stephens = Norman Bates?!?

posted in misc |

Following on from searching for books by the colour of the cover, it would be just plain rude if I didn't have a stab at ripping off retrievr at the same time!

Once Iman gets back, I'm going to grill him mercilessly about the best way to analyse and match images. In the meantime, here's my first stab at searching…

Using ImageMagick, I resized the book covers to 8×8 pixels and then stored the hex colour value of each of the 64 pixels in a database table.

For example, Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" changes from…

…to something like this (I've added the black lines)…

You can then give it an image like this one to search for…

…then cross your fingers and see what pops out the other end…

imagetest1

The search works by comparing the hex colours of the 8×8 version of the search image with the corresponding pixels of the book covers. Each book cover then gets ranked by how well it matches the search image.

The only catch is that it currently takes about over 30 seconds to complete the search, hence the need to get Iman on the case.

Anyway, I'm sure what you really want to know is what the lowdown on Michael Stephens is — here's what came out the other end when I gave it a well known image of Mr Stephens…

Michael Stephens / Norman Bates

Just for fun, here's a few more searches…

imagetest2

imagetest3

imagetest6

imagetest7

imagetest5

imagetest4

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 10 responses to “Michael Stephens = Norman Bates?!?”

Why not let us know what you think by adding your own comment! Your opinion is as valid as anyone elses, so come on... let us know what you think.

  1. 1 On February 1st, 2007, David Rothman said:

    I don't know why, but I LOVE this.

    posted on February 1st, 2007 at 9:31 pm

  2. 2 On February 2nd, 2007, Carlos Lopez said:

    Damn! What would happen if you made the image 16×16 px? Would you get more hits, or more accurate hits? (it's pretty impressive at 8×8!)

    c.

    posted on February 2nd, 2007 at 9:44 am

  3. 3 On February 2nd, 2007, Dave Pattern said:

    I was wondering the same thing too Carlos!

    I've started reindexing the book covers using a 16×16 image, although I know it will make the search run considerably slower.

    It should definitely improve the matching — here's how Mr Stephens looks at 8×8 and 16×16:

    The 16×16 is almost recognisable… kind of like looking at Michael through the bottom of a Coke bottle whilst squinting hard!

    (heh — wouldn't it be cool if, when Michael gave his next presentation, it was to a room full of librarians looking at him through Coke bottles whilst squinting!)

    posted on February 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 pm

  4. 4 On February 4th, 2007, ex libris said:

    search by book colour/cover…

    I was fascinated by Dave Pattern's work on searching for books by the colour of their covers and his subsequent searches using images to find similar looking books. I think this stuff is really cool and am impressed with the way he went about app…

    posted on February 4th, 2007 at 4:56 pm

  5. 5 On February 21st, 2007, Susan said:

    Dave, I WANT THIS! Do you think we can get them to build it into the functionality of 8.x? — q

    posted on February 21st, 2007 at 4:33 pm

  6. 6 On February 21st, 2007, Dave Pattern said:

    Hi Susan!

    I did mean to add an update to this post…

    Moving to 16×16 seemed to make the matching worse, as the likelihood of a book cover matching the original image decreased — so, using 8×8 actually made for better matches!

    There must be an optimum size that has just the right about of "vagueness" to give good matches, so I'll keep on experimenting.

    In terms of adding this into the OPAC, I did think it would be possible to analyse the book covers to get the average colour and then maybe that could be added to the MARC record (so it could become a searchable index)?

    If you didn't want hex colour codes in the MARC reccord, you could map the colour to the nearest web colour name. That way, you'd be able to run a keyword search and then limit the results to just "lightsalmon" coloured books :-D

    posted on February 21st, 2007 at 5:04 pm

  7. 7 On May 18th, 2007, Michael said:

    Now that is most definitely the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

    The match for Beginning Perl is brilliant - have you considered jacking in this web stuff in favour of a career as an MS Paintbrush artist? :)

    posted on May 18th, 2007 at 10:29 am

  8. 8 On February 24th, 2008, Paulo Diovani said:

    Hi, are you still working on the code?

    This is really impressive. Was it made with what? perl?

    Have you tried to apply this search to other things than book covers only? Like faces, animals, etc…

    I was planning, some days ago, to make an app to search images through the web by an example image and thinking of do this using neural nets, but never go on coding… But your app could, maybe, does it much better.

    Please, contact me.

    posted on February 24th, 2008 at 1:20 am

  9. 9 On February 24th, 2008, Eneas said:

    Hello,

    This is really cool. Great job. Don't stop with this.

    Regards,

    Eneas

    posted on February 24th, 2008 at 3:32 am

  10. 10 On March 11th, 2008, Book covers, revisited » "Self-plagiarism is style" said:

    [...] spotted that Tim is busy working on something that I dabbled with last [...]

    posted on March 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm

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