Thank you for sharing my site! I built this a number of years ago as I was starting to learn about Japanese prints. I wanted a single place where I could find them across all of the various museums and universities that hold them. I use computer vision analysis to cluster prints together (using TinEye). A bunch more technical details from the last time this was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344979
I’m working on a new site now that’s focused on prints that are for sale from dealers and auctions. Much more technically complex as it needs to be continuously updated. Hope to have a public beta soon!
We have "Red Gate in the Rain" by Kasamatsu Shiro [1] hanging in our home. I uploaded a photo of it and had a great time browsing other works by Shiro.
My wife also noted that we'll eventually inherit Shiro's "Snow Falling at Red Gate" [2], in the same series, from her aunt.
We've a couple other prints that I am going to search now... thanks again!
Thank you for creating such a wonderful site! Woodblock printing is one of my favorite art forms.
My grandparents visited Japan long ago and gifted me two wooden boxes, one with this print on the lid: https://ukiyo-e.org/image/aic/99027_512658 and the other with https://ukiyo-e.org/image/honolulu/8277. They're secret boxes with no hinges or hardware, but if you press on certain locations in the correct order, sections will slide and the lid unlocks and can be opened.
Is there a way to stay informed of when your new print site launches?
Uh - woah! This is incredibly unexpected. I'm really glad people are interested in my database and in Japanese prints!
From a technical perspective there've been a lot of interesting open source projects that I've made to support this site:
https://johnresig.com/projects/ukiyoe/
I've also written a number of papers and given presentations on the work that I've done here (and elsewhere in the digital humanities).
https://johnresig.com/research/
I've since worked on a number of other projects like a database for a consortium of Art History Photo Archives: http://images.pharosartresearch.org/
And I'm building another one now on Japanese Picture Books (from the 19th century and older).
These are all my "spare time" fun hobby projects, my day job is still at Khan Academy as a Frontend Architect. I just enjoy getting to explore other types of applications and problem spaces!
I found this to be an incredible resource, not only for Japanese prints (a relatively new but definitely cool acquaintance) but also for the various open source technologies used.
Especially interesting to me is the https://github.com/mongaku/mongaku library for image searching. Haven't used it in a project yet, but expect I will. Thanks for this (and the other amazing things of immeasurable impact like jQuery you authored)!
This is an amazing site! I haven't really gotten into ukiyo-e but this is so great for exploration and discovery. I think there are a lot of other genres/topics as well that I would love to have a site like this.
I appreciate the work put into making the site light and responsive, even with so many images. And I find the mouseover functionality really neat, too - even if it's not the most practical way to view hundreds (or thousands!) of works at a time, it's completely mesmerizing.
Just to clarify: YUI and ExtJS both came out after jQuery, jQuery came out in 2006, and jQuery is actually more popular now than it was a year ago (or in 2010 - see the figures cited in the blog post).
Not exactly. It's linking to the old SAT practice material that's for the old (current) SAT exam. The new material, for the upcoming 2016 exam, which was just launched today, is available at:
After doing some more poking it appears as if Avisynth (and thus NNEDI3) is Windows-only. Do you happen to know if there are ways to run it in Linux or OSX? Or if there's a comparable set of software for those platforms?
Avisynth should run in Wine, but there is also Vapoursynth[1] (which works natively on OSX & Linux) and a NNEDI3 port[2] for it. After getting both of them up and running, a script like this[3] ran with the vspipe program that comes with Vapoursynth should do the trick. It's a bit cumbersome since Avisynth and Vapoursynth are primarily intended for processing video, not images, but it gets the job done in absence of a dedicated NNEDI3 resizing tool. I'm actually using this exact setup at work myself when I need to do any image upscaling.
NNEDI3 is fantastic - thank you for providing a link and some samples!
You're absolutely right that I shouldn't have said "normal". I update the post to clarify that this was using "OSX Preview". I did some hunting but didn't find any obvious pointers as to which algorithm they're using. If anyone knows offhand I'll be happy to include it!
Yeah, why they're going through all that hardware effort, I dunno. Simpler developer workflow I guess. Would be interesting to do a cost/benefit vs. just using a Linux stack.
The 'hardware effort' is to get dramatically improved processing time by using the GPU since they're trying to do it on a much larger scale.
I have/continue to use imagemagick and similar software-based solutions and they're pretty slow for multi-MB images (but most servers don't have good GPUs so it's the only solution unless you're building custom racks as imgix does).
Yeah, I'm not super sure about the dramatically improved processing time. Especially compared to a SIMD-optimized scaler. You have to spend some time sending the image to the GPU and reading it back too.
Especially if you set imagemagick to use the much worse scaler that imgix uses, I imagine it'd be pretty fast.
On the other hand, if you replaced imgix's stack with the high quality scalers from mpv (written as OpenGL pixel shaders), and then compared to expensive CPU scalers, I would expect a GPU solution to be a win.
Note that imgix also has to recompress the image as PNG or JPEG at the end. This has to be done on the CPU and is probably more resource intensive than any of the scaling.
You can upload 100s of MBs of texture data to a GPU in milliseconds. Sending and receiving from GPU doesn't actually take that long in comparison to the time it takes to process a multi-MB file in software.
Well, OSX Preview seems to be doing something interesting as I can't seem to find an exact match with some quick attempts, but whatever method they use it looks rather similar to Lanczos scaling.
Yeah, on second thought, after seeing the low noise reduction result again, I suspect that may be an even better result for what I'm looking to achieve. Many of the details in his rope are preserved and the calligraphy appears to be in better shape.
reply