Solving the image search problem

[The_Big_K]

CEans,

I was wondering if there's a way to search an image by uniquely identifying its contents. At present, the search engines rely on the tags & other textual metadata.

I've few ideas, but I'd like to listen to yours first. This could also be an interesting project and an idea for a startup!

[kidakaka]

You could find out the boundary of all the shapes in that image, find out similar shapes from an existing library of basic shapes and do pattern matching.

[ash]

Ah yes, edge detection for finding the shapes could work!

Other than shapes, colour data can be useful too. I saw on Deviant Art where they have this palette thing to find other images with similar colours.

[anuragh27crony]

and more usual method...Content Based Image Retrival (CBIR)..but i think success percentage is low around 40-45%

What is CBIR?
where you extract a feature vector from a image and search Database to search images with similar feature vectors.....

[kidakaka]

Funnily enough, all the searches we discussed as yet, involve finding a particular type of metadata, and searching in that metadata!!

Is there another method where no metadata has to be generated?