A Python CLI tool to compare images listed in a CSV file and calculates similarity score of two images along with elapsed time.
If you have programmatically find out similar images out of N set of images present whose paths are mentioned in a form of a csv file.
And your file looks like this
| Image1 | Image2 |
|---|---|
| images/file1.jpg | images/file2.jpg |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg |
| images/file5.png | images/file6.png |
| images/file8.png | images/file9.png |
| images/file10.gif | images/file11.gif |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg |
Note : Path can be anywhere on your disk.
The script by default creates a file in the current working directory with name output.csv if not specified explicitly.
| Image1 | Image2 | Similar | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|---|
| images/file1.jpg | images/file2.jpg | 38.3941134213051 | 0.019 |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg | 0.0 | 0.0439 |
| images/file5.png | images/file6.png | 65.16600491471311 | 0.0843 |
| images/file8.png | images/file9.png | 66.34622945969112 | 0.0731 |
| images/file10.gif | images/file11.gif | 13.29321011760659 | 0.0007 |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg | 0.0 | 0.0445 |
You need to install python virtualenv to make this program run in an isolated environment with its own version of modules.
For instructions setting up the same on (MacOs/Windows/Linux), please follow the link below
https://packaging.python.org/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/
git clone https://github.com/abbasalizaidi/ImageComparisonTool/virtualenv ImageComparisonToolcd ImageComparisonTool/source bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
Yes, you can! Actually images are essentially bitmaps and bitmaps are stored in the form of pixels in the computers memory. So, if we are able to make some computation around the pixels, then we can play around with pictures with the help of computer programming.
We can use the checksums to compare the images but we can cannot quantify the difference. A single change can drastically change the checksum.
A blog post actually described, calculating root mean square error value can help in identfying images which are similar (0 value) and those which aren't on how much different they are.
Lower the value of RMSE ----> More similar images are!
Note :- Similar images has RMSE value as 0.
So lets take two images, Image1 and Image2. If we can serialize these images into a format on which we can calculate the RMSE value, we can calculate the score of the images.
Pillow is a python library which has modules named Image and ImageChops. Further, these modules contains methods which can take images as arguments and can calculate the difference between the images. For more information
So, all we need to do is to process the csv files and extracts the paths and process the images to calculate the root mean square value.
Keeping all these things in mind, I designed a python cli script which takes two arguments --src and --dest (for source and destination csv files respectively) and outputs a file with a score column containing the level of similarity between two images.
Tool also calculates the elapsed time in comparing the two images. This can help in quantifying the efforts.
Prerequisite : Please follow the installation steps
After you have followed the installation steps, you are ready to run the application.
python3 image_comparison.py --src image_database.csv --dest output.csv
The above command will create a file named output.csv which has the following structure
| Image1 | Image2 | Similar | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|---|
| images/file1.jpg | images/file2.jpg | 38.3941134213051 | 0.019 |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg | 0.0 | 0.0439 |
| images/file5.png | images/file6.png | 65.16600491471311 | 0.0843 |
| images/file8.png | images/file9.png | 66.34622945969112 | 0.0731 |
| images/file10.gif | images/file11.gif | 13.29321011760659 | 0.0007 |
| images/file3.jpg | images/file4.jpg | 0.0 | 0.0445 |
Note : The elapsed time is in seconds
You can also type --help to check the usage of the command
python3 image_comparison.py --help
usage: image_comparison.py [-h] [--src SRC] [--dest DEST]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--src SRC Path to source file
--dest DEST Path for destination file