In the beginning of 2019, I worked with the members of the Impresso team to bring simple visual search capabilities to their astounding collection of historical newspapers.

  • Efficient computation of the visual signatures for the scale of the project (Millions of images)
  • Integration of the search in the existing infrastructure through SOLR extensions, allowing complex queries filtering on the metadata and ranking on the visual similarity of an input image at the same time (year, article topic, etc.)
  • External service allowing users to search from their own images and not just elements already indexed in the database

  • Ability to search similar people in the data through the use of face detection and face recognition

  • (bonus) Helping the team moving their expensive computation on a Kubernetes cluster in order to scale some of the very large processes they do.