Introduction
This tip will illustrate the use of Google Search by Image functionality in your .NET Application.
Background
A couple of months ago, Google launched the new search by image service, the one that allows you actually to identify images just by dragging them to the search bar or simply attach a link for a specific image and the service will tell you what is going to be like, inside the image !
It seems to be a great concept, and it would be greater if Google made it available for the good of developers to help them implement stunning scenarios that leverage this service. I’ve been using Google search by image for quite good time, I started to investigate how this technology works, basically it “converts” your image to a hash and sends it to the server then the server replies to you back with a search query. This tutorial will present how to integrate this service into a desktop application (or mostly a Windows 8 application, in the future maybe) to build a Goggles-like where you can give it a URL then get a search query describing the image content and when your business will start!
This tutorial will not take you through how to use this service to build a mobile application although these sorts of scenarios should be prioritized first in such applications, but the fact that the helper still in its alpha release makes it limited to the kind of applications highlighted in this tutorial.
Still wondering what to do? Actually, you can implement identification scenarios, images classification and everything related to what would an image "say".
Okay, let’s start by the helper itself, SBI Sharp is a little class that helps you do all the above and it's available at Codeplex.
- Add SBISharp.dll as a reference to your project:
- Add the following code snippet:
var result = SBISharp.SBIHelper.SearchByImage("YOUR IMAGE URL HERE");
I've tested it with this picture:
and it gave the following:
Now go ahead and check what you’re able to do with it !
The next tutorial will take you through the helper itself and the way it interacts with Google Search by image service.
Happy coding!
