Akator Image Matching

A powerful API service for precise and efficient matching of images against a custom image collection. Primary use cases include avoiding duplication of images or checking images against a set of images known to be protected by copyright.

If you are interested in registering as a user of this service, please contanct info@akator.de.

This is a service created by Akator.

Overview

The API is provided as a classical HTTP (“REST”-like) interface for

• creating collections, i.e. image sets in which similar images are to be searched for;
• uploading images to collections, which are stored in a lower resolution in our system for later retrievel and for providing detailed similarity measures during search;
• retrieveing stored images (in limited resolution);
• most importantly, matching an arbitrary image against one of the provided collections or against another provided image.

Matching here refers to the search for a similar image in the collection with a given tolerance as well as calculating several similarity measures against those similar images.

HTTP interface

The API base URL is https://matching.akator.de/api/v1.1 . Please find a detailed API documentation here and a general overview with basic examples below.

Authentication

Currently, the service is only available to selected registered users (if you want to declare your interest, please do so via info@akator.de).

Once registered you will be provided with a secret access token authenticating you against our system in the form of a 64-character string, e.g. abcedfghijklmnopq0123456789/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789. For every request to our API you need to provide this key in the HTTP header of the request:

Authentication: Bearer abcedfghijklmnopq0123456789/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789

In a later version you will be able to manage access tokens for organization yourself (e.g. using several tokens, defining limited time of validity, and/or revoking tokens).

Simplified example of how to get started

(The examples given in the following use curl as a simple example of how to try the API from your command line interface. Please also refer to the detailed API documentation.)

To start using the service, create one or more collections, which you want to match images against, later (every match is against one selected collection), e.g.:

curl -H "Authentication: Bearer abcedfghijklmnopq0123456789/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789" \
     -X POST \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{"name": "my collection"}' \
     https://matching.akator.de/api/v1.1/collections

You will receive a response with the id of the collection just created, e.g. 1.

Then upload images to that collection following

curl -H "Authentication: Bearer abcedfghijklmnopq0123456789/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789" \
     -X POST \
     -F image=@example.jpg \
     https://matching.akator.de/api/v1.1/collections/1/images

For matching an image against all images in this collection with a tolarance of min_ssmi_score=0.7 and limiting the result set to the ten most similar images (limit=10), run:

curl -H "Authentication: Bearer abcedfghijklmnopq0123456789/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789" \
     -X POST \
     -F image=@image_to_search_for.jpg \
     https://matching.akator.de/api/v1.1/collections/1/match?min_ssim_score=0.7&limit=10