TinEye
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Type of site
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Image Search Engine |
|---|---|
| Available in | multilingual |
| Owner | Idée, Inc. |
| Website | tineye.com |
| Alexa rank |
 4,895 (Jan 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | yes |
| Registration | optional |
| Current status | active |
TinEye is a reverse image search engine developed and offered by Idée, Inc., a company based in Toronto, Canada. It is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. TinEye allows users to search not using keywords but with images. Upon submitting an image, TinEye creates a "unique and compact digital signature or fingerprint" of the image and matches it with other indexed images. This procedure is able to match even heavily edited versions of the submitted image, but will not usually return similar images in the results.
Idée, Inc. was founded by Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore in 1999. Idée launched the service on May 6, 2008 and went into open beta in August that year. While computer vision and image identification research projects began as early as the 1980s, the company claims that TinEye is the first web-based image search engine to use image identification technology. The service was created with copyright owners and brand marketers as the intended user base, to look up unauthorized use and track where the brands are showing up respectively.
In June 2014, TinEye claimed to have indexed more than five billion images for comparisons. However, this is a relatively small proportion of the total number of images available on the World Wide Web.
As of October 2015, TinEye's search results claim to have over 13 billion images indexed for comparison.
A user uploads an image to the search engine (the upload size is limited to 20 MB) or provides a URL for an image or for a page containing the image. The search engine will look up other usage of the image in the internet, including modified images based upon that image, and report the date and time at which they were posted. TinEye does not recognize outlines of objects or perform facial recognition, but recognises the entire image, and some altered versions of that image. This includes smaller, larger, and cropped versions of the image. TinEye has shown itself capable of retrieving different images from its database of the same subject, such as famous landmarks.
TinEye is capable of searching for images in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format. As of 2009[update], other formats that contain images online, such as Adobe Flash, are not searchable.
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