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https://github.com/scrubbbbs/cbird

Command-line program for managing a media collection, with focus on Content-Based Image Retrieval (Computer Vision) methods for finding duplicates.
https://github.com/scrubbbbs/cbird

command-line-interface computer-vision content-based-image-retrieval duplicate-detection duplicate-files duplicates ffmpeg opencv qt6 similarity-search

Last synced: 29 days ago
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Command-line program for managing a media collection, with focus on Content-Based Image Retrieval (Computer Vision) methods for finding duplicates.

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README 

        
![](screenshot.png)



About cbird

=========================

cbird is a command-line program for finding duplicate images and videos that cannot be found by general methods such as file hashing. Content-Based Image Recognition (CBIR) is used, which examines the pixels of files to get comparable features and "perceptual" hash codes.



The main features are:



- CBIR algorithms for image and video search

- Cached index in the top directory, prevents needless re-indexing

- GUI for evaluating duplicates

- Huge index/database is possible

- Comprehensive file format support

- Search inside zip files



Installing

=========================



### Compile



Compile it yourself using [my detailed notes](doc/cbird-compile.md).



### Download



[Download binaries on Github](https://github.com/scrubbbbs/cbird/releases)



#### Linux AppImage



Add execute permission and run

```shell

chmod +x cbird-0.7.0-x86_64.AppImage

./cbird-0.7.0-x86_64.AppImage -install # optional install helper

cbird [...]

```

- Required packages: trash-cli

- Optional packages: ocenaudio, kdenlive



##### AppImage Issues

- AppImage won't run (debian, Ubuntu 23.04+)

  + `apt install libfuse2`

- Missing libOpenGL.so.0

  + debian: `apt install libopengl0`

  + redhat: `yum install libglvnd-opengl`

- Missing window titlebar (Fedora)

  + `cbird -platform wayland-egl [...]` 



#### Mac OS X 11.0+ x86



- Unzip the distribution file and run



`cbird/cbird-mac [...]`



#### Windows 10

- Unzip the distribution file and run the program

- Install helpers (optional): vlc, kdenlive



##### Windows PowerShell

Optional: create shortcuts for cbird



- Unzip into C:\ so you have C:\cbird\cbird.exe

- Enable script execution

  + Run PowerShell as administrator

  + Enter ``Set-Execution-Policy RemoteSigned``

  + Close PowerShell

- Create profile script (if you don't have one)

  + Run PowerShell normally

  + ``New-Item -Type File $PROFILE -Force``

- Add cbird shortcut to profile

  + `OpenWith $PROFILE`

  + `Set-Alias -Name cbird -Value C:\cbird\cbird.exe`

- Shortcut for pictures folder

  + `function cbird-pics {cbird -use $HOME\Pictures $args}`



Getting Started

========================



#### Get Help

`cbird -help` [is very detailed](https://gist.github.com/scrubbbbs/c7177a0a97e098c6bb10ae4afe8f6c35)



#### Index the files in ``, caching into `/_index`

`cbird -use  -update`



#### Index files in cwd

`cbird -update`



#### MD5 Checksums

`cbird -dups -show`



#### Search cwd, default threshold

`cbird -similar -show`



#### Search cwd, lowest threshold

`cbird -p.dht 1 -similar -show`



Using the GUI

=====================

This is lacking documentation at the moment. But for now...



- The GUI is displayed with `-show` if there is a selection or results.

- GUI windows have a context menu (right click) with all available actions.

- The two deletion actions ("Delete" and "Replace") use the trash/recycler by default. There is no way to permanently delete files (not even with batch deletion commands)



Use Cases

=========================

- Find exact duplicates (using file checksums)

- Find modifications

  - General transforms: resize, rotate, crop

  - Image edits: blur, sharpen, noise, color-grade, grayscale

  - Video edits: clipping, fps change, letter boxing

- Evaluate matches

  - Compare attributes (resolution, file size, compression ratio)

  - Flip between matches

  - Zoom-in to see fine details, compression losses

  - False-color visualization of differences for fast evaluation

  - No-reference subjective quality estimate

  - Jpeg compression quality estimate

  - Align videos temporally, flip between them or play side-by-side

- File management

  - Sort/rename based on similarity

  - Rename files using regular expressions

  - Move/rename files/directories within the index



File Formats

=========================

Common formats are supported, as well as many obscure formats. The available formats will ultimately vary based on the configuration of Qt and FFmpeg.



`cbird -about` lists the image and video extensions. Note that video extensions are not checked against FFmpeg at runtime, so they could be unavailable.



Additionally, zip files are supported for images.



To get the most formats you will need to compile FFmpeg and Qt with the necessary options. Additional image formats are also available with [kimageformats](https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kimageformats).



Link Handling

======================

Links are ignored by default. To follow links, use the index option `-i.links 1`



If the search path contains links, they are only considered when scanning for changes (`-update`), otherwise there is no special treatment. For example, deleting a link is the same as any other deletion operation.



Duplicate inodes are not followed by default. If there are duplicate inodes in the tree, the first inode in breadth-first traversal is indexed. To follow all inodes, for example to find duplicate hard links, use `-i.dups 1`.



The index stores relative paths (to the indexed/root path), this makes the index stable if the parent directory changes. However, if a path contains links, or is a link itself, it is stored as-is; which may be less stable than the storing the link target. To store the resolved links instead, use `i.resolve 1`. This is only possible if the link target is a child of the index root.



Note that cbird does not not prevent broken links from occurring, the link check is temporary during the index update.



Using Weeds

======================

The "weed" feature allows fast deletion of deleted files that reappear in the future. A weed record is a pair of file hashes, one is the weed/deleted file, the other is the original/retained file. When the weed shows up again, it can be deleted without inspection (`-nuke-weeds`)



## How weeds are recorded



1. Two files are examined (matching pair) -- use `-p.mm 1` or `-p.eg 1` to force pairs

2. Neither file is a zip member

3. When one of the two files is deleted, it is marked as a weed of the first one



## Broken weeds



There is nothing to prevent deletion of the original/retained file, so the weed record can become invalidated. If the original is no longer present, the association can be unset with the "Forget Weed" command.



```

cbird -weeds -show # show all weeds

cbird -nuke-weeds  # delete all weeds

cbird -similar -with isWeed true # isolate weeds in search results

```



Environment Variables

======================

There are a few for power users.



- `CBIRD_SETTINGS_FILE` overrides the path to the settings file (`cbird -about` shows the default)

- `CBIRD_TRASH_DIR` overrides the path to trash folder, do not use the system trash bin

- `CBIRD_CONSOLE_WIDTH` set character width of terminal console (default auto-detect)

- `CBIRD_COLOR_CONSOLE` use colored output even if console says no (default auto-detect)

- `CBIRD_FORCE_COLORS` use colored output even if console is not detected

- `CBIRD_LOG_TIMESTAMP` add time delta to log messages

- `CBIRD_NO_BUNDLED_PROGS` do not use bundled programs like ffmpeg in the appimage/binary distribution

- `QT_IMAGE_ALLOC_LIMIT_MB` maximum memory allocation for image files (default 256)

- `QT_SCALE_FACTOR` global scale factor for UI

- `TMPDIR` override default directory for temporary files; used for opening zip file contents

- `CBIRD_MAXIMIZE_HACK` set if window manager/qt is not restoring maximized windows (default auto-detect)



Wish List, Bugs, Etc

====================



Check the [development notes](doc/cbird-devel.md) for known bugs and feature ideas.



Report bugs or request features [on github](https://github.com/scrubbbbs/cbird/issues)



Search Algorithms

====================

There are several algorithms, some are better than others depending on the situation.



#### Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) Hash (`-p.alg dct`)

Uses one 64-bit hash per image, similar to pHash. Very fast, good for rescaled images and lightly cropped images.



#### DCT Features `-p.alg fdct`

Uses DCT hashes centered on scale/rotation invariant features, up to 400 per image. Good for heavily cropped images, much faster than ORB.



#### Oriented Rotated Brief (ORB) Descriptors `-p.alg orb`

Uses 256-bit scale/rotation invariant feature descriptors, up to 400 per image. Good for rotated and cropped images, but slow.



#### Color Histogram `-p.alg color`

Uses histogram of up to 32 colors (256-byte) per image. Sometimes works when all else fails. This is the only algorithm that finds reflected images, others require `-p.refl` and must rehash the reflected image (very slow)



#### DCT Video Index `-p.alg video`

Uses DCT hashes of video frames. Frames are preprocessed to remove letterboxing. Can also find video thumbnails in the source video since they have the same hash type.



#### Template Matcher `-p.tm 1`

Filters results with a high resolution secondary matcher that finds the exact overlap of an image pair. This is most useful to drop poor matches from fdct and orb. Since it requires decompressing the source/destination image it is extremely slow. It can help to reduce the maximum number of matches per image with `-p.mm #`



How it Performs

====================



### Indexing



Indexing happens when `-update` is used. It can take a while the first time, however subsequent updates only consider changes.



Unused algorithms can be disabled to speed up indexing. If you have large images, you may as well enable all algorithms because image decompression dominates the process.



#### Table 1: Indexing 1000 6000px images, 8 GB, SSD



Arguments | Note | Time (seconds)

--------------------|----------------|------ 

-update             | all enabled    | 46

-i.algos 0  -update | md5 only       | 2

-i.algos 1  -update | +dct           | 41

-i.algos 3  -update | +dct features  | 44

-i.algos 7  -update | +orb features  | 44

-i.algos 15 -update | +color hist    | 46



### Searching



Search speed varies with algorithm. The OpenCV search tree for ORB is quite slow compared to others. It is better suited for `-similar-to` to search a smaller subset suspected to have duplicates.



#### Table 2: Searching 1000 images



Arguments             | Note          | Time (milliseconds)

----------------------|---------------|------ 

-similar              | dct           | 54

-p.alg fdct -similar  | dct features  | 200

-p.alg orb -similar   | orb features  | 9000

-p.alg color -similar | histograms    | 450



### Large Datasets



Indexing large sets of smaller images benefits from disabling algorithms.



#### Table 3: Indexing 500k 400px images in 100 zip files, 39GB, NAS



Arguments | Note | Rate (Img/s) | Time (minutes)

--------------------|----------------|-----|---------- 

-i.algos 0 -update  | md5 only       | 861 |  9:41

-i.algos 1 -update  | +dct           | 683 | 12:11

-i.algos 3 -update  | +dct features  | 377 | 22:04

-i.algos 7 -update  | +orb features  | 348 | 23:56

-i.algos 15 -update | +colors        | 227 | 36:39



For N^2 search (`-similar`) only DCT hash is normally practical.



#### Table 4: Searching 500k images



Arguments | Note | Time (s)

-----|------|------ 

-p.dht 1 -similar  | dct, threshold 1  | 5.5

-p.dht 2 -similar  | dct, threshold 2  | 5.6

-p.dht 3 -similar  | dct, threshold 3  | 5.9

-p.dht 4 -similar  | dct, threshold 4  | 7.1

-p.dht 5 -similar  | dct, threshold 5  | 8.9



For K*N (K needle images, N haystack images) the slower algorithms can be practical even for large datasets. For a quick test we can select and search for the first 10 items:



`cbird -p.alg fdct -select-type i -head 10 -similar-to @`



#### Table 5: Searching for 10 images in 500k



Arguments | Note | Time (s)

-----|------|------ 

-p.alg dct -p.dht 2  | dct, threshold 2           | 1.3

-p.alg fdct -p.dht 7 | dct-features, threshold 7  | 1.5

-p.alg orb           | orb-features               | 84.4[^1]

-p.alg color         | colors                     | dnf[^2]



Release Notes

=============



#### v0.7



- Mac OS X port and x86 binary package

- Use current libraries (FFmpeg, Qt6, Quazip)

- Command Line

  - describe what -filter is doing

  - cleanup some logging

- Indexing

  - Use "nice"/low priority when scanning/indexing

  - 3-4x faster jpeg indexing using idct scaling

  - Recognize more video extensions

  - Remove colon (":") workaround for powershell

  - Failsafe cache updates using write-temporary-move method

  - Fix slow cache update on network volumes

  - Fix -i.ignored to actually track all ignored stuff

- Searching

  - Add % progress for sql queries, cleanup logging

  - Search using a given hash code

  - Use numeric sort for filenames (e.g. 1.jpg sorts before 10.jpg)

  - Functions are always chainable and consistent between commands

  - Properties: add aspectRatio

  - Disable inode check on win32, too slow on network volumes

  - Fix attempt to template match video result

- Viewing

  - Add theme system, remove hardcoded theme/style

	- auto-detect dark/light theme on mac/windows

	- shade background windows when modal window is displayed

	- "-theme" to change the theme

  - Streamline context menu

  - ffplay-sbs: tons of improvements

  - Do not require index for -select-files

  - DPI-aware image scaling

  - Show creation time metadata for videos too

  - Browse the selected item in its folder

  - Use grid for folder view and fixed thumbnail aspect ratio

  - Cycle contents thumbnails when hovering in folder view

  - Add index/folder thumbnail tool

  - Fix some performance issues

  - Fix keyboard navigation in folder view

  - Fix missing match range

  - Prevent crash/hang on some invalid inputs (corrupt videos etc)

  - Fix slow qualityscore on network volumes

  - Fix potential crash on two-tone images

  - Fix potential crash/hang with corrupt video files

  - Fix elided strings display

	

#### v0.6.0

- Add weeds feature (recommended by r/user/traal)

- Search: Add max-threshold `-p.mt` which produces a result for every needle until threshold is exceeded

- Indexer: Use skip-loop-filter to speedup video indexing ~20%

- Indexer: Option to show all ignored files

- Indexer: Handle links sanely by default, add options `i.links`, `-i.dups`, `-i.resolve`for other cases.

- Filters: Add -head/-tail

- Image view: difference image can align to template match 

- Video view: fix issues with unequal frame rates

- Video view: export the aligned pair to Kdenlive

- Speedups: video compare view, differences image, `-group-by`



[^1]: OpenCV search tree only partially cached on disk, slow to start

[^2]: Color search lacks a search tree, not suitable for large sets