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Covers Color Search  (View post)

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, March 26, 2009
15 years ago4,086 views

It works really well!

At the moment it usually matches the background color. Here's an experiment you might like to try: Add a checkbox labeled "Attempt to match foreground color". When that is checked, return images whose SECOND most common color matches the chosen color.

You would probably want to store an extra column in your table for "color rank" which holds 1, 2, 3 etc according to whether the color is the most common, second-most-common, etc for that image.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

I pondered allowing to select color combos of two. The database already contains the rank data, because I can sort by percent (at least if it's above 10%...). Let me run some experiments.

Ben Allen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Very cool. Cover Browser always gets a hold on me.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

> When that is checked, return images whose SECOND
> most common color matches the chosen color.

As an update, now after clicking the primary color, you can right-click another color to define a secondary color...

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Interesting results, although if I left-click "red" then right-click "yellow", some results are yellow with no red at all. So I don't feel that yellow is really "secondary" to red in this search. It's more like "additional".

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Now that you mention it, you're right. The only way the second color is secondary is that it runs a more fuzzy search than the original color, which needs to be precisely found... so it would vary more to what you picked, therefore being a "weaker" interpretation of your click choice. At the same time it's a broader match. I should try combine this with forcing the percent of the secondary color to be weaker, too. [If there's anyone in the house who'd like to dabble with the current MySQL statement, please email me :)]

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

I won't take you up on your offer to dabble with the SQL, because I would need another column in the table for what I wanted to do. But I did some experimentation and found out that it wouldn't work anyway.

What I'd like is to be able to search for "blue" and find images like this one where blue is the color of the subject rather than the color of the background:
http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestsellers-2007/1079-1.jpg

I thought I might be able to do this by searching for the second-most-common color (and thereby ignoring the dominant background color).

But I explored a lot of images and found that this approach isn't going to work. Very few images are like the example above. It's much more common that the main subject of the cover is multi-colored, or that the subject is single-colored but so small that it's the third or fourth most common color.

Omer Tabach [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

I really lack the technical background to back my claims,
but the example Roger showed reminds me of Captcha.

Maybe after the background color (the most "dominant" color, which is really only the most common) is filtered, you should try and scan the image for the foremost object- and use its colors as the secondary?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

One could try figuring out connected shapes, beyond just overall colors grabbed from random sample pixels. Either by some shape detector algorithm (haven't tried), or perhaps by reducing the overall colors of the image to say 16 and then applying flood fill to a couple of near-edge pixels. This should perhaps only leave the shapes in the middle, if they have sufficient color contrast. Hmm.

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