Orange Orange

80 Million Tiny Images

Thanks to C.J. for sending me the following, incredibly cool link: 80 Million Tiny Images. It’s a mosaic of millions of online images corresponding to nouns in the English language, and the spatial arrangement of the images in the mosaic reflects their semantic relationship to each other–i.e. closer images represent words that are closer in meaning. From the page (which also contains a link to the research paper):

Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,463 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob. The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words. Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance.

The most interesting thing about the result is the remarkable degree of color agreement that they achieve. Despite the fact that each tile is the average of several photos of the same thing, the end result is often surprisingly recognizable, and close-by tiles tend to have the same color scheme. The overall mosaic, rather than appearing as a wash of meaningless color noise, has some fairly uniform blobs on it because of the semantic association of images. The one they give on the website (composed of 7.5 million images, it seems–not 8 million) almost looks like a hunched over figure of a person. I wonder what the full 80 million images put together looks like.

The real question is, when can I get this as a wall poster to put up in my room?