Chapter 2. Searching for Luxury Accommodations Worldwide

Today the bridal suite, tomorrow a prison. A secret agent's sleeping arrangements are horribly unpredictable.

Each day someone in MI6 gets the job of booking a stellar hotel room and conversely, some evil henchman has to pick a warehouse or dilapidated apartment, plus a lamp, a chair, and implements of bondage. For mini missions or brief beatings, it is tolerable to leave the choice of venue to a fallible human being. However, for long-term rentals or acquisitions, would it not be wiser to develop a specialized search engine that takes the legwork and the guesswork out of the equation?

With this motivation, we are going to develop a desktop app called Luxocator: The Luxury Locator. This is a search engine that will find images on the web by keyword search and will classify each image as a "Luxury, interior" scene, "Luxury, exterior" scene, "Stalinist, interior" scene, or "Stalinist, exterior" scene, according to certain visual cues in the image.

Particularly, our classifier relies on comparing statistical distributions of color in different images or sets of images. This topic is called color histogram analysis. We will learn how to efficiently store and process our statistical model, and how to redistribute it along with our code in an application bundle.