Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs

Google has rolled a new visualization tool for their powerful image searching system that combines technology available in some of their other products with powerful image recognition technologies to allow you to view images in a graph-layout mapped by similarity.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.

Currently, it only seems to work for a fixed number of pre-selected queries (200,000 at time of writing).

via Official Google Blog: Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs. via Infosthetics

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .