deepViewer: Picture Catalog & Search Engine

There’s this ridiculously smart Intel guy I meet with on a regular basis named Francois. He’s a big car guy, currently favoring the Nissan GTR, and also happens to be incredible knowledgeable about all things SSE and video related. For the past couple of years Francois has been showing me a little application called deepViewer pretty much every time I meet with him.

deepViewer is a photo organizing application, it allows you to quickly navigate through all of your photos. The pictures are organized in a large calendar, you can zoom in and out very quickly (assuming you have a fast hard drive, or SSD, and fast CPU); the whole thing is very movie like.

I’ve never written about deepViewer before because the application isn’t out yet (although it will be soon). While navigating through your pictures quickly is a cool feature, it’s not enough to get excited about. Today in my Intel meeting Francois showed me something a little more interesting.

deepViewer got an upgrade, it can now find all similar pictures in your library. Simply right click on your photo and then tell the software to find similar images.


The circles in the image above are the portions of the image deepViewer looks to match in its database. The larger the circle, the higher the weight of that part of the image.

Internally, the application samples a number of points from the image and searches for similar elements in all other images. The search works according to elements of the image like faces or backgrounds and colors. The search isn’t exactly live, all of this data is sampled when you index your images and it’s simply updated as you add more photos to your library.

The process of searching isn’t very CPU intensive, it’s the indexing that needs a fast CPU. Naturally, Francois demonstrated deepViewer on a Core i7 (it was overclocked to 4.6GHz using water).

Intel Demonstrates "Talking" Cars Portable Wireless Access Points: Intel’s My WiFi
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  • Zoomer - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link

    To be fair, the eee isn't 1.2lb like the sony is.

    Would probably make a difference in their overstuffed handbags.
  • VooDooAddict - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link

    Netbooks are slow. Even these $500-$900 units being toted here.

    People are usually willing to take 2 out of 3. I'll take slow, portable, and cheap. but not slow, portable, and expensive. Netbooks have a perfect niche under $400.

    I've got an Acer Aspire One it's perfect... for $300. If I had paid $500+ for this kind of performance I'd feel robbed.

    To even get a glance $900 that Sony for $900 needs a dual core Atom and 2gb of ram.
  • JonnyDough - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link

    Netbooks aren't THAT slow. A modern netbook could run Windows 95 fantastically. They can even handle XP ok. But Vista + Atom = slow, no. You simply can't run Vista with the current Atom lineup.
  • aeternitas - Sunday, January 11, 2009 - link

    I hope you mean Windows 2000. There is no reason to run Win95 on anything anymore. We have light distros of Linux for hardware that slow with way more functionality and compatibility.
  • JonnyDough - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link

    You'd be an idiot to run Windows 95 on anything connecting to the internet. My point was that Vista cannot run on crap hardware.
  • OCedHrt - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link

    I believe Microsoft's dev team has released an unsupported driver that allowed the wireless NICs under Windows to be emulated, allowing you to link an emulated wireless with any of the free Wireless AP software that is available today.

    Also, many MB manufacturer's who have the wifi cards also bundle it Wireless AP software.
  • strikeback03 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link

    Or, verify that the hotel actually does not allow multiple devices to use the same MAC. I accidentally found that our network (with MAC filtering) at work does not care if two systems use the same MAC address.

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