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Reverse image search [NOT URGENT] #13

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npscience opened this issue Sep 1, 2017 · 3 comments
Open

Reverse image search [NOT URGENT] #13

npscience opened this issue Sep 1, 2017 · 3 comments

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@npscience
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Nate (@xolotl) from hypothes.is had the idea of finding similar images using reverse image search , the process where you input an image as your search term, and google returns similar images (or other images from that webpage, etc).

For ReFigure, this could mean running the search from the figure you are looking at, find other images/figures on the web that are similar, add relevant ones to the ReFigure. So it's about discovery of related material before it's been curated/linked by a scientist.

This brings up several Qs:

  • Are scientific figures indexed on Google appropriately to be used in this way?
  • Is the search algorithm refined enough for scientific application? For example, it may not be useful to find graphs with a similar pattern, because they could be about completely different experiments. I could see a potential use case for microscopy images - are there other cells that look like this, or that cluster like this? - but the algorithm would need to be finetuned enough to show the relevant findings and not present the user with lots of microscopy images that are similar but irrelevant.
  • Would this be useful? If you are asking about your own work, then maybe you would want to do so without having an image published already (whether in journal or repository), in which case ReFigure isn't the tool to employ this functionality.

Leaving this thought here for future reference, thanks to Nate for bringing it up!

@re-figure
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@npscience @xolotl what a great thread! I have been thinking about similar problems and tinkering with some databases namely PMC and Open knowledge Maps (@npscience, can you introduce me to latter?) Our major motivation (to answer your usefulness question) was to "autopopulate" and then ask ReFigure users to confirm connections.

I use google image search a lot and it is not clear why it lumps certain set of images under the same search. Google does have a reverse image search but I have not used it and not sure how it is doing it.

our search algorithm is very basic...of course if we get to having 10,000 images it would still be useful. The most applicable current technology appears to be actually identifying images based on the text surrounding them. On PMC ARTICLE (not image) search, the "related articles" do seem to be closely related. Similarly, the articles that land up in one of the bubbles of the open knowledge maps are usually closely related.

@xolotl does image annotation work for hypothes.is now?

@xolotl
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xolotl commented Sep 2, 2017 via email

@re-figure
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re-figure commented Sep 2, 2017 via email

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