TinEye Reverse Image Search

Introducing MulticolorEngine: Cloud based color search

December 12, 2012 – Toronto. The TinEye team has been busy building one of the most extensive image recognition API platforms available. The platform includes a number of image recognition services that will be released in the upcoming months but today we are very excited to announce that MulticolorEngine, our color search API, is now commercially available!

MulticolorEngine, the API powering the TinEye color search lab, has been released and is commercially available for licensing. This API can be integrated with any image collection to allow users to search images by colors. Ideally suited for e-commerce and image-centric websites, and requiring no technology infrastructure changes. MulticolorEngine features include:

• A color indexer that extracts and indexes all the colors in a collection of images. No manual tagging/keywording of colors is required.
• The ability to search using one or more colors, or to search for images matching the color palette in another image.
• A color palette generator which will find all the colors present in a single image, or a collection of images. Using this feature you could display all the colors you have available in sofas, chairs and tables, and then let a user filter their search to only display green chairs.
• Support for structured meta-data search. Allowing you to build interfaces that can, for example, find all products priced less then $50.00, in the 'shoe' category that most closely match a particular shade of yellow.
• Arbitrary meta-data searching. So if you have multiple collections, tags, and prices, these attributes can be searched for along with up to 5 colors.
• Support to provide a count of the number of products you have that match a particular color, allowing users to easily browse your collection by color. For example you could let users know that you have 32 different varieties of red, 16 yellow, and 66 black shoes for sale.
• Easy integration with your existing search technologies and development infrastructure.
• The ability to ignore solid or transparent backgrounds in images. This is critical for product images where the background of the image should not be considered a color during a product seach.

MulticolorEngine is fast, scales to handle any image collection size from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of images.

This color search API allows users from every operating system to integrate color search into their applications (mobile or otherwise) and websites without impacting their current technology infrastructure. An example would be how we integrated color search into an addictive color search lab using Creative Commons Flickr images: http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr
This lab is leveraging MulticolorEngine to search a 10 million image collection by colors.

The MulticolorEngine also includes a feature that allows users to extract colors from any image indexed by the API. We have built a color extraction lab around this feature and today, users can simply upload an image to the TinEye lab to extract the colors contained in their image: http://labs.tineye.com/colors

With this release, which is the first of a series of image recognition API releases, we are excited to continue building our vision for an integrated image recognition platform. If you are interested in helping in any way, we are hiring. Join us!

About TinEye

TinEye the world's first reverse image search engine helps million of users in the world find the images and attributions they are looking for faster using image recognition. TinEye is committed to building and image search and recognition platform that will support the integration of image recognition into third party and enterprise applications as well as image centric websites.

TinEye is made with love and caffeine in Toronto, Canada.