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.