APIs – Piximilar and PixMatch

When you are working on a photo-related web service or mobile app you cannot evaluate the contribute that some APIs can give to it.

Today I want to talk about Piximilar and PixMatch, both these APIs are developed by Idée that is specialized in inmage recognition and visual search software.

But let’s do a small summary of what you can do with the help of these solutions.

Piximilar

Piximilar Visual Search is an API that allows you to search through a large image database, without keywords or metadata, and it will find and show you similar photos, based on their content analysing attributes like colour, shape, texture, luminosity, complexity, objects etc.

Here is a video of this technology applied to a stock images database.

PixMatch

PixMatch instead is a general image matching engine that lets you compare images, identify duplicates and filter them, everything on-the-fly and very fast.

There’s only one drawback of this API because it’s an hosted web service and you need to send your image collection via HTTP to their servers and even though it support huge collection, this could be a problem if you want to use photos you don’t host on your servers.

For more information check out the company site

But now let’s go back to us. What are the practical uses and application you can create with these sort of service?

At NightFarm we are evaluating to integrate these APIs in our, under-development, location based Photo service. Firstly to improve the results obtained from our search algorithm, so that we can exclude too many similar images taken in the same place. Then, imagine you are looking for a nearby place similiar to a photo you’ve seen on the web and show it on a map. This would be very useful and improve the user experience.

This is really a hard life..

This post is just to let you know that in this period there are few posts because it’s a very full and hard period.

I know that every time I tell you this, but every time it’s the real fact.. I’m not a liar.

What’s keeping me really busy apart from the university exams that are draining my life is an important project that I’m taking on with one of my very best friends Mirko. (I don’t even remember if I’ve already talked about this before). This project It’s taking a lot of time to him too because he’s working very hard to realize many things I’m not able to do. So I take this chance also to thank him for the great job!!.

So, what about the project?

We are trying to build up a small company that will develop mobile applications. NightFarm is the company name.

At the moment we are implementing the code for our site.. It’s an hard work because it will be written using the latest CSS improvements, in order to give you a smooth and great experience.

We are also developing our first app starting from the design and the functions we want it to possess. For the moment I can only say that it will be a fantastic and useful app for photographers and people who like to take pictures.. 🙂

If you want to check our job visit the company blog, the site, or follow us on twitter 😉