80 million tiny images
Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman have come up with a novel visual dictionary of the English language. Using nearly 8 million images from Google Images, they have created a pictorial dictionary of some 53 thousand nouns:
We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob…My brain must be addled today, as I can’t figure out how the numbers above lead to a total of 80 million, however it is quite fun to click on the mosaic and see what turns up.