Mall Watching
Me and my wife seldom goes to the mall except when the kids acts a little noisy, annoying and you can already read in their forehead the word “bored”. Or when we have to buy quick items for the house, and other times is when we have business appointments usually held in coffee shops.
During this times our (couples) favorite pass time is to watch the people we came across and compete who can identify a look-a-like for celebrities, movie heroes and just a look-a-like of people whom we know. Don’t get me wrong but it’s not what you think, we are not doing it a negative way, but more on the positive side. Sometimes we can come up with look-a-like who is a cross of two persons or personalities we know. It’s funny try it.
We also enjoyed this pass time in the port terminals, in new places we visit and even movies we watched. We believed we are getting good at it that we sometimes fancy of creating a “Double Company” to supply “doubles” for the film industry.
Anyway, while surfing the net last night I came across a very interesting site with a technology that will definitely change the way we see the world and the Internet.
Powerful Search Engines
We are all familiar with the powerful search engines like Yahoo, Bing (from Microsoft) and my favorite Google. By simply typing keywords this engines will list millions of websites arranged with relevance in just a split of a second, making sense all the vast information available from the Internet.
However, keyword search is limited to searching things that are easily described with text. But how can you describe a specific design of shoes or jewelry, or a painting you don’t exactly know?
This is where Superfish comes in.
Visual Search
An image worth a thousand keywords.
Superfish is a visual search technology that allows you to search images based on a “key image”. Example given a delicately designed shoe(s) it will search and list all shoes with strikingly similar attributes. The concept is simple yet very powerful.
There no better way see how it actually work but to visit these sites: http://www.jewelryviewer.com and http://www.shoewindow.com.
There are many potential applications.
Fashion and Arts
One already mentioned above is in the fashion and design industry. You can search and compare shoes, jewelries, furniture designs.
Architecture and Landscapes
Another would be in architecture given an architectural design you search similar movement from across the globe. You can also find similar city landscapes, and mountain ranges.
Nature and Animals
You can also use this technology to find similar insects, animals, rock formation, vegetation and flowers.
Crime Investigation
This technology could help solve crimes, authorities will now be able search the Internet based on a suspects pictures.
Superfish Google
The Superfish demo sites as of now only search images within there domains. For this technology to really be of much use, it should be integrated with a search engine that would crawl the Internet and index the vast images already available. But I would love to see this technology merged with the already powerful Google search engine.
Your Look-a-Likes
If you are still wondering whether you do look like Tom Cruise, you can use your best picture to see and search if he is one of your look-a-like. Just don’t blame the engine if some Neanderthal man appears in the result!