> > Thanks for the info! SIFT really looks like a heavy weight solution, > > but do you think the whole concept can be simplified if all I needed > > was: given a photo, find similar ones? I mean SIFT first detects > > objects on the image and find similarities, but I don't need the > > detection part at all, all I care about is similarity for the whole > > photo. I surely don't understand the big picture fully but just have > > the general feeling that SIFT and other expert tools are an overkill > > for me and a simplified version would be just as good with a much more > > easily comprehensible core algorithm. > > Please describe the kind of photos you are dealing with. Are they > identical photos, in say different formats or with different metadata? > Or are they rescaled images? Or maybe they are the same photo cropped > differently?
The photos are just coming straight from my digital camera. Same format (JPEG), varying size (6-10 megapixel) and I would like to be able to pick one and then query the database for similar ones. For example: I pick a photo which is more or less a portrait of someone, the query should return other photos with more or less portraits. If I pick a landscape with lot of green and a mountain the query should result in other nature (mostly green) photos. Something along these lines, of course the matches won't be perfect because I'm looking for a simple algorithm, but something along these lines. > SIFT will work in more or less the process you described in your first > post. It basically calculates the N sets of numbers for each image, > representing the unique features of that image and their relative > positions. The rest of the process if up to you. You have to compare the > different sets of numbers to find the image with the minimal difference, > as opposed to comparing the whole image. Great, this sounds very good, I'll give SIFT a try (at least trying to understand the basic concepts) although at the moment it looks a bit scary :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
