TinEye: Image Search Engine and Art Theft Detector

TinEye should be interesting for people who want a powerful tool against art theft and copyright infringement because by uploading your original image or entering the URL of the image you can instantly see who has stolen your image (which some people say is also a good indicator of how famous you really are ;)).

According to the official FAQ, TinEye seems to be really promising. These are only excerpts:

What does TinEye do?

TinEye does for images what Google does for text.

Just as you are familiar with entering text in Google to find web pages that contain that text, using TinEye, you enter an image to find pages where that particular image (and modified versions of it) appears.

Can TinEye find alterations of a query image?

Yes. As long as they are alterations of the same query image, TinEye can find them and include them in your search results.

Note that search results are ordered by ‘relevance’ (i.e. how well the result images match your query image), so image alterations are typically found at the end of your search results.

What sorts of image alterations can TinEye find?

It depends upon the image, but TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image.

(Check out the whole FAQ at http://tineye.com/faq)

The only downside of this project is that it's still in beta. This means that the number of images in their database is to be expanded (although it can search 580 million images by now), and you need an invitation to sign up and use it. However, on the TinEye home page you can enter your e-mail address to request an invitation and roughly after one day you'll get one.