Elastic Vision

I have created a new site where you can download my smart image search tool, called 'Elastic Vision'.

Goto Elastic Vision site

It shows each retrieved image in an 'organic' visual network. The images are clustered based on their visual content, enabling you to pick the best from a set of similar images of varying quality.

Here's a small demo of the tool in action. You can find a higher-resolution version on the site itself (just click 'demo').

In Search of Van Gogh

Besides my 'normal daily duties' for my customers I've spent quite some time on the visual gadget I talked to you about before. The tool provides you an overview of all current news items by showing a picture with a caption above it. The pictures are retrieved from a predefined set of web pages on the web. Clicking the picture leads you to the original web page, scrolling automatically to the right article. By the way, I call it "Elastic Vision" because of the way all pictures are interconnected in an elastic net.

This time I've added an extra function to perform a search for pictures on the web. Of course we know Google and Yahoo provide such services with their search engine, but the Elastic Vision gadget also clusters the retrieved images based on their visual content. Using the Crazy Diamonds pattern recognition algorithm, similar pictures end up next to each other in the net. For example, searching for "Van Gogh" comes up with this:

Click the image to enlarge it.

I'll show you some zoomed-in parts of the net. First, the part with his sunflower paintings:


Again, the clustering is based on visual (color) content, not on tags or keywords. As you see the software detects enough similarities between the flower paintings to cluster them together.

I've added a feature to show the size of the picture as a caption, so that you can pick the resolution you want.


Oh, I forget to tell you that I'm using Yahoo's excellent image search API to retrieve the url's of all relevant pictures. It is very easy to use and for free.

I'm about to finish the first release of the Elastic Vision gadget. It will be downloadable later on from one of my websites (for free). I'm looking for people that would like to give it a go and play around with it, so if you're interested send me a note at the address below and I'll get you a copy.

Perpetuum immobile

Yesterday I went to a session of the dutch Advaita Vedanta 'missionary' Jan van Delden at Haarlem Central Station. He uses a whole set of attributes to deliver his message in a very funny and visual way. I have attended more Advaita sessions from other teachers, but this guy is also a great stand-up comedian. Check him out if you have the chance!

Basically Advaita tells you that permanent happiness cannot be found 'out there'. Nothing in the world will make you happy forever, period. The cause of our unhappiness lies in the fact that we identify with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts. We think there is an entity in our head that is controlling our life, and we call it 'I'. Jan uses the metaphor of our thoughts as a scrolling text display that is claiming out attention all the time.


LED Text Generator

Advaita invites you to enquire into this assumption that has never been doubted before. In the end you will find out that you are not your thoughts and feelings but the observer of these thoughts and feelings. We are watching the messages on the text display, we are not creating thoughts and feelings.

We can speak of a First Cause behind everything. Some people call it consciousness or awareness. It is the stage for all good and bad things to happen. Without the First Cause there is nothing. This First Cause is not affected by the things happening, like space cannot be 'damaged' by its content. We are that First Cause, not the content. Our general assumption that we are that entity behind our eyeballs is just plain wrong. This First Cause is indestructible and timeless and therefore I came up with the term "perpetuum immobile".

News update

I haven't been writing to this blog for a long time so it is about time to give you a quick update on the ongoing work. At the moment I'm looking at different applications of the Crazy Diamonds core and let me tell you something about the one I've been working on at the start of this year.

I am going to introduce a new way to read your daily news, called 'visual news reading':


Instead of going from site to site this approach shows you an overview of all news item images from a number of predefined sites. Images with a similar subject are clustered and text-labeled. I did not upload a video as before because of the poor resolution of the result.

Hovering over an image will enlarge the image and show a textual description of the news item. What you see here is a cluster of images (from multiple websites) related to the Democratic race between Obama and Clinton in the US election. The mouse pointer has disappeared because of the screenshot.


Clicking an image will open up the original source and scroll down to the news item:



This tools allows you to really dig into a news item without surfing from site to site and searching for it.

In this case images were taken from news headlines pages but other categories can be defined and shown such as Sport, Showbiz, etc.

I think this tool could be interesting for people at home but also for entertaining people in public places like waiting rooms, airports etc. I've noticed during demo's that people really have fun playing with this tool, especially the way the images interact with each other.

At the moment I'm working on a web-based version of this tool using .NET's Silverlight technology. I'll keep you informed on the progress of this little visual news reader and would appreciate any feedback from you people.