Getting started

You’ll need a (scientific) Python distribution and a database backend. Currently we use Elasticsearch as a backend.

numpy, PIL, skimage, etc.

image_match requires several scientific Python packages. Although they can be installed and built individually, they are often bundled in a custom Python distribution, for instance Anaconda. Installation instructions can be found here.

You can set up image_match without a prebuilt distribution, but the performance may suffer. Note that scipy and numpy require many system-level dependencies that you made need to install first.

Elasticsearch

If you just want to generate and compare image signatures, you can skip this step. If you want to search over a corpus of millions or billions of image signatures, you will need a database backend. We built image_match around Elasticsearch (OpenSearch and MongoDB are also supported). See download and installation instructions. We’re using Elasticsearch 7.x in these examples.

Install image-match

Here are a few options:

Install with pip

$ pip install numpy
$ pip install scipy
$ pip install "image-match[elasticsearch]"   # or [opensearch], [mongo]

The backend client libraries are optional extras; install only the one you use. Async driver variants are available as [elasticsearch-async] and [opensearch-async]. See Other database backends for details.

Build from source

Clone this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/ascribe/image-match.git

Install image_match

From the project directory:

$ pip install numpy
$ pip install scipy
$ pip install .

Make sure elasticsearch is running (optional)

For example, on Ubuntu you can check with:

$ sudo service elasticsearch status

If it’s not running, simply run:

$ sudo service elasticsearch start

On OSX, to have launchd start elasticsearch, run :

$ brew services start elasticsearch

or simply run ,

$ elasticsearch

Docker

We have a Docker image that takes care of setting up image_match and elasticsearch. Consider it an alternative to the methods described above.

$ docker pull ascribe/image-match
$ docker run -it ascribe/image-match /bin/bash