Domain-specific languages for fixture generation – a case study with Antlr4

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a programming language or descriptive file format to formulate and solve specific problems in specific domains, as opposed to generic descriptive file formats (such as XML) and general-purpose programming languages (such as Java) which can be employed in any domain. A paradigmatic use case for a domain specific programming language…

Playing around with fragment shaders in WebGL

WebGL is a graphics library for web browsers, based on a version of OpenGL for embedded devices, OpenGL ES. The library allows for customized real-time 3d graphics rendering in modern browsers, including the use of shaders. There is a variety of scenarios in which you would want to make use of such a library. Consider,…

Image similarity search with LIRE

Content-based image similarity search — determining the images in a database visually similar to a search image on the basis of pixel data alone — is a hot topic. Applications are numerous. Just recently, amazon.com has introduced a visual product similarity search for some products, and google has introduced a search-by-image feature.

In addition to hands-on applications, there is a lot of research on the topic. The abilities of university maintained image search engines grow constantly. Unfortunately, implementing current techniques requires a bunch of specialist knowledge and some mathematical sophistication. Fortunately, however, there are effective simple techniques for which there exist open source libraries.

One such library for JAVA is the LIRE API. In this short article, I demonstrate how to implement a basic linear content-based visual image similarity search using this library.