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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear to me how they find the crucial picture of him (the one he holds the beer). The article says "user th0may used a reverse image search and discovered a photograph of a man holding a beer", but /u/th0may's thread on Reddit doesn't say anything like that [1].

If anything, /u/th0may himself said in thread, "maybe you already found this image", which implies that the image itself is already known (and likely NOT discovered by "reverse image search", but by other ways). /u/th0may then reverse-searched the image to find the website, which lead to the answer.

Anyway, I'm still curious how they find this beer image, since this looks to me is the most important step.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

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He guys, first up I’m the guy who found the image of him holding a beer. It was barely simple I used the webpage https://pimeyes.com/en uploaded the image from the card, cropped it a little to hide the Japanese characters etc. The first two result where the same that I scanned. The third was the image holding the beer. I saw some resemblance, but didn’t think it would work. PimEys let’s you search for free but you have to pay for the full url. So I took the fraction of the url figured out the full one. Found the original image on the webpage. And then posted my findings to Reddit. I and also other users found new pictures of him the following days. On the 28th of December we found an image with him wearing a bib from a half marathon through the results I found the name and it was Satoshi.

One of the comments says:

I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments.

So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has one, for what it's worth [1].

[1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)

It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find faces instead of google image search which is just comparing the similarities of the different pixels."

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random Internet images would presumably be prohibitively expensive.

Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API before, it does have a built-in database even with all the names of celebrities marked already.

It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone now.

I don't know much about the state of the art in image recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a different expression, a slightly different haircut and he appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the network not to miss it but also not to report millions of false positives seems like a very high bar.

It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated low quality photos.

We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could very well have gone through thousands of images, following up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd certainly like to know more about that part of the process.

i know little about the state of the art in image recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a pretty good job identifying faces

No idea is it is state of the art but I just tested PimEyes(the reverse image search service mentioned) with an old photo of me, it returned a bunch of photos of random people but also two of me within the first 30-40 results. One is older, 7-8 years maybe, and one is more recent, 2 years perhaps.

I have different facial expressions and the pose/angle is different than the one I submitted.

I found this part the most interesting too. There’s a comment in the reddit thread now where the author says: It is called PimEyes but it does not give you the full url unless you pay. So I had to start digging from what I got.

From a comment further down that thread:

"heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D"

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