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May 26, 2007

Restrict Google Image Results to Faces, News

Google Image Search has a new feature that lets you restrict the results to some general categories. For the moment, the only categories that are available seem to be faces and news-related images, but other categories should follow.

The image results for Paris are pretty diverse, but most of them are about the French city and Paris Hilton. Now let's restrict the images to faces by adding &imgtype=face at the end of the URL: we get all kinds of images, but all of them show faces. Google uses face detection technology to select only images that contain faces and that may be the first visible result of the Neven Vision acquisition.


The restriction to news-related images seem to include only images posted to news sites like BBC or New York Times.


You can try the two restrictions in the search box below:





{ Via Blogoscoped Forum. }

Update (June 24): The options are now available in the advanced search interface in a new section titled "content types".

22 comments:

  1. I believe that this is a rip-off of exaleads content option on image search. It was definately influenced by it. BTW how did you find out about the &imgtype= thing. Just a guess?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Exalead unveil this feature 2 months ago.
    And... is it useful?

    ReplyDelete
  3. It could be useful when you try to find pictures of a person. The restriction removes some of the unrelated images.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am searching for all images of the beautiful French capital.

    Is there any way I can prevent images of that skinny, blonde, jailbird and self-publicist appearing ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Is there any way I can prevent images of that skinny, blonde, jailbird and self-publicist appearing ?"

    Ha, so true.

    To our luck there is a way, type this into your query box:

    paris -"paris hilton"

    The minus says "No, I dont want pics of that skinny blonde girl who does nothing useful".

    ReplyDelete
  6. i think "paris -hilton" yields even better results, you arent looking for random hilton hotels in paris, right?

    ReplyDelete
  7. << I am searching for all images of the beautiful French capital. >>

    A good query would be:
    Paris France

    ReplyDelete
  8. "you arent looking for random hilton hotels in paris, right?"

    I think you'll find I am...;)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi, we have now been working for a while on a prototype, proof-of-concept image search engine called Behold that combines visual concept analysis with traditional text search. It does what the article says but in a more extended manner.

    http://www.beholdsearch.com

    It currently indexes over 1 million images from university websites (obviously much smaller scale than Google). So far it handles 57 visual concepts which can be helpful when extracted html metadata is poor. It can do what this article says, i.e. restrict search results obtained through traditional search by the probability of the image containing a particular visual concept. This feature is available here for you to try:

    http://go.beholdsearch.com/searchc.jsp


    More about this feature on this blog post:

    http://beholdsearch.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-feature.html

    Perhaps Google will use this technology one day.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I knew it will happen one day but I didn't know that it will be that soon!
    Way to go goole….Always been my favorite IT company for their creativity: D

    ReplyDelete
  11. well, i pimped up the face-search a little bit. not it's actually usefull and you can search again for fresh faces without retourning to the previous page. hope some of you like it.
    http://www.presseblog.at/facesearch/

    it's part of my long tail of serach engine project....

    ReplyDelete
  12. Indexing images by faces is a logical step for Google Image and should appear also soon in Picasa, unless automatic face finding is not yet fast enough ! As a matter of fact, as all images retrieved by Google have been processed off-line while for indexing my personal photos using Picasa I might need real-time stuff !

    Here is another demo of face image indexing (and tagging) using Google Image and a on-the-fly face detection:
    http://www.idiap.ch/googleportrait/

    You can also search image results for Paris Hilton: http://www.idiap.ch/googleportrait/index.cgi?query=Paris+Hilton
    or even Angelina Jolie (http://www.uberreview.com/2007/02/google-portrait-face-detection-system.htm).

    ReplyDelete
  13. Quite interesting enough!
    We have developed query-by-example style face search engine on the web images. It has working demo site. Although large part of indexes are of Koreans, some of world celebrities (eg. Paris Hilton) will be ok.

    ReplyDelete
  14. PARIS HILTON- New Sex Tapes From Her Auctioned Storage Locker
    http://depositfiles.com/files/1432708

    ReplyDelete
  15. PARIS HILTON- New Sex Tapes From Her Auctioned Storage Locker
    PARIS HILTON- New Sex Tapes .

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hey guys! Some help please...
    I'm trying to build a database of faces. I need to find thousands of photos, but of a specific nature - Half should be 90 degrees to the camera (profile) and half 45 degrees to the camera (half profile).
    Any ideas on the best way to do so?

    Thanks a lot!
    Michael.
    mcherkass@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  17. Very Cute! I like it! With your help, I can easily find many faces that I appreciate.Thank you very much.

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  18. To google.

    Are you planning to do a sort of face recognition search machine??

    I see it working like that:
    1. I will upload a picture of a person to the search machine.
    2. Press search.
    3. It will return more pictures of this person.

    (could be a person or some other object)

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  19. It's about time:) I've got real depressed of getting these pictures of Paris Hilton (some of them not for children) during my trip planning to France, I'm grateful at least that she wasn't there when i had my vacation, Paris (the city!) is great!

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  20. Yay! The tools for internet stalking just keep getting better lol.

    ReplyDelete
  21. I need to find thousands of photos, but of a specific nature - Half should be 90 degrees to the camera and half 45 degrees to the camera .

    ReplyDelete

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