Advanced Image Search thanks to TinEye

Have you ever wondered whether the images on your website are being used somewhere else? Do you want to know whether your images under creative commons licences are famous all around the web? Or do you want to discover copyright infringements and plagiarism? Now you can, thanks to TinEye.

TinEye.com is the first reverse image search engine on Internet. That means that you provide an image or image URL, and TinEye performs a lookup of usages of such image throughout Internet.

Nevertheless, TinEye still has some limitations. The database of images where the searches are performed is still somehow small (only a few billions of images, which is far from the huge amount of images available in Internet). On the other hand, every time you perform new searches in TinEye the image database is increased with such new information.

But the most surprising fact about TinEye is that it will find image copies even when they aren't exact matches. TinEye can find duplicates even if they have been resized, cropped, renamed and somehow edited. TinEye uses the small snapshot or fingerprint of the submitted images to create the image database where the data used for comparison are stored.

I carried out some experiments and I found even image duplicates that were trimmed, downscaled, filled with noise and turned into grayscale images.

What are you waiting for? Give TinEye a try and tell me what you found!

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