Have You Seen Images Speak About Their Differences?
Image Compare is a lightweight, standalone and offline application to visually compare a pair of images and highlight the differences between them. This application can be used in desktop computers and mobile phones without requiring installation as it runs entirely in a web browser. Image Compare is an open source software developed and maintained by the VGG Oxford.
Try It Before Installing
Installation Guide
Installation Guide

Note: Image compare application has been tested to work only in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers in desktop and mobile platforms.

Features

Offline

Can be used without an active internet connection.

Visualisations

Several ways to visualise the similarity and difference between images.

Open Source

Complete freedom to use this application or modify its source code.

Light Weight

The full application is less than 2Mb in size and therefore is faster to load and easier to share.

Standalone

No installation is required as the application runs entirely in a web browser.

Advanced Mode

Choose geometric transformation (e.g. similarity, affine, thin-plate spline, etc.)

Use Cases

Altered Photograph

Original Photograph (left) and altered version (right)
[Source: Daily Mail]
Using the Image Compare application, we can align the two photographs and identify the altered regions using the toggle visualisation (shown above).

Image compare application can be used to highlight alteration in photographs.

Digital Collation

Page from one edition of an early printed book (left) and the same page from a different edition of the book (right)
[Source: Julia Smith, General Editor, The Oxford Traherne]
Using the Image Compare application, we can align the photograph (or scan) or the book pages from two different editions of the same book. Toggling visualisation (as shown above) of such aligned book pages allows us to quickly spot the differences in text between the two editions.

Book historians often use manual methods to compare different copies of the same text and to identify variants between them. This process is called collation and it is a crucial part of scholarly editing. The Image Compare application provides a new way to perform digital collation by creating visualisations that allows book historians to easily identify differences in text of early printed books. This method of digital collation is already being used by a large number of scholarly editing projects all over the world.

The collation of early modern texts therefore has been revolutionized by the Traherne Digital Collator [predecessor of Image Compare application] which is incomparably easier and faster to use, and enables more detail and sophisticated textual analysis than has previously been possible. It is now being used not only by the Oxford Traherne project, but by a variety of prestigious scholarly editing projects across the world." -- Julia Smith, General Editor, The Oxford Traherne

Art Restoration

The original (left) Portrait of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo and the restored version of this painting (right).
[Source: Restoration of paintings at Wikimedia]
Using the Image Compare application, we can align the portrait of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo art work taken before and after the restoration. These aligned images are shown above in the form of toggle visualisation available in the Image Compare application.

Physical damage or natural degradation of a painting can be tracked using the Image Compare application. It can also be used to see the changes introduced by an art restoration procedure as depicted by the portrait of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo art restoration example shown above.

Satellite Imagery

Tokyo (Japan) Landsat image in 1986 (left) and the same region captured by another satellite in 2017 (right).
[Source: Wikimedia Commons (1986, 2017)]
Image Compare can align satellite imagery of a place take at different point in time (e.g. in the year 1986 and 2017) and highlight the changes to that part of the Earth in the toggle view (shown above). You can notice several newly built bridges along the river in the above satellite image.

Satellites are continually capturing photographs of the Earth surface. Such photographs of a region taken at different point in time can be compared using the Image Compare application to show changes in land occupancy, state of forest, new built areas, etc.

Music Notation

A page of the vocal score of Puccini's La Bohème, published by Ricordi in separate years. Using the same engraving plate, the publisher made emendations and changes between these two publications. Divergences, for instance in the number of bars in the bottom system of the page, are clear to see in Image Compare. [Source: PerformingEditions.com via Brad Cohen]
Image Compare can align music sheets taken from different editions of the same book and highlight the differences between them using the toggle view (shown above).

"The Image Compare application is a powerful tool for comparison of music engravings taken from the same original engraving plates." -- Brad Cohen

Spot the Difference Puzzle

Spot the difference type puzzles can be solved or its solution can be verified easily using the Image Compare application. [Source: Wikimedia]
Image Compare can align the two images in a spot the difference puzzle and toggle between the two images to help easily spot the difference (shown above).

Solve puzzles like a pro 😎.

About

Image Compare software application is developed and maintained by:

Prasanna Sridhar
Abhishek Dutta
Andrew Zisserman

Development and maintenance of the Image Compare software has been supported by the VisualAI research grant.

Contact Prasanna Sridhar for any queries or feedback related to this software application.