Visual Search in Unsplash

Creative Commons photo sharing site Unsplash (where I also have a profile!) has launched a new feature: Visual Search, similar to Google’s search by image. If you’ve found a photo you’d like to include in a blog post or presentation, for example, but the image is copyrighted, this new Unsplash feature will help you find similar-looking ones that are free to use. The launch post doesn’t go into detail about how Visual Search works, but I’m guessing some (convolutional) classification model extracts features from all images on Unsplash to create a high-dimensional embedding; the same happens to the image you upload, and the site can then serve you photos that are close together in this embedding space. (Here’s an example of how you’d build that in Keras.)