Advertising with Land Mines

The land mine sticker above is part of a land mine awareness campaign by Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund). The other side is sticky and camouflaged with a pattern to match flooring. When the camouflaged ad is stepped on, it sticks to the bottom of the shoe. The text on the front reads, “In many other countries you would now be mutilated! Help the victims of land mines!”

There is a beauty to this type of guerilla advertising. It allows for an organization without a lot of resources to spend a small amount of money on a clever advertising gimmick and then see their message spread multiply through the internet as sics like ours report the gimmick. Some of us even have enough shame to spread the message as well.

Where we live, if we fail to watch where we step, we end up with a smelly shoe. Other countries aren’t so lucky. For more on Unicef and land mines, see their page here:

http://www.unicef.org/emerg/index_landmines.html

Image Search By Image – Google

Ever wanted to search for images using an image? I often find images that are out of context online and want to know where they originated. Sometimes I take a picture of a weird bug and want to know what it is, and sometimes I just want to put in a favorite image and see what the algorithm finds that it thinks is similar.

From a processing standpoint, the task is monumental. We take so many social and stylistic cues from an image. I can’t imagine trying to tech a program to find what some random person on the internet is looking for in the pile of billions of images that is the web, but Google has decided to take it on.

Let’s give it a challenge and see if it panics!

First, go to Google’s image search page. Then drag an image into the search bar. That simple. I’m using Kevin Sloan’s awesome image above to see what we can find.

Well, it still needs work clearly, but I’m actually rather impressed. First of all, it did nearly instantly find me a ton of sources with the same image, so if you are using it that way, it gets an A+. The above pictures came from a section it refers to as ‘visually similar images’. What impresses me is how many completely unrelated but undeniably similar compositional elements it found. The search engine isn’t differentiating objects like we would, as flamingo and monkey, which on the one hand is unsurprising, but on the other, I’m a little shocked that not a single similar image popped up on the front page with either a flamingo or a monkey in them. It instead seems to have focused on composition, pattern, and color.

Take the picture of the woman with her children in the upper right; she is wearing a flamingo colored shirt, the cup in her hand is its head. There is a cloudy sky, trees on the horizon, the shadow on the lawn gives us the plateau, the monkey is seen in her sunglasses, and its leg in the same position as her daughter (held). Her shorts are the sky under the flamingo, and perhaps best of all, the stovepipe as monkey tail.

I can’t wait to play with this some more. I sense a multitude of new memes coming from this, with every famous image in history having a page of doppelgangers.