examples VS pgvector

As another commenter noted, Milvus is overkill and a "bit much" if you're learning/playing.

A good intro to the field with progression towards a full Milvus implementation could be starting with towhee[0] (which is also supported by Milvus).

towhee has an example to do exactly what you want with CLIP[1].

[0] - https://towhee.io/

[1] - https://github.com/towhee-io/examples/tree/main/image/text_i...

Usually this is done in three steps. The first step is using a neural network to create a bounding box around the object, then generating vector embeddings of the object, and then using similarity search on vector embeddings.

The first step is accomplished by training a detection model to generate the bounding box around your object, this can usually be done by finetuning an already trained detection model. For this step the data you would need is all the images of the object you have with a bounding box created around it, the version of the object doesnt matter here.

The second step involves using a generalized image classification model thats been pretrained on generalized data (VGG, etc.) and a vector search engine/vector database. You would start by using the image classification model to generate vector embeddings (https://frankzliu.com/blog/understanding-neural-network-embe...) of all the different versions of the object. The more ground truth images you have, the better, but it doesn't require the same amount as training a classifier model. Once you have your versions of the object as embeddings, you would store them in a vector database (for example Milvus: https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus).

Now whenever you want to detect the object in an image you can run the image through the detection model to find the object in the image, then run the sliced out image of the object through the vector embedding model. With this vector embedding you can then perform a search in the vector database, and the closest results will most likely be the version of the object.

Hopefully this helps with the general rundown of how it would look like. Here is an example using Milvus and Towhee https://github.com/towhee-io/examples/tree/3a2207d67b10a246f....

Disclaimer: I am a part of those two open source projects.

I have shown how to Build an Image Search Engine in Minutes in the previous tutorial. Here is another one for how to optimize the algorithm, feed it with large-scale image datasets, and deploy it as a micro-service.

The full tutorial is at https://github.com/towhee-io/examples/blob/main/image/reverse_image_search/build_image_search_engine.ipynb

# Install Postgres and pgvector !apt-get update && apt install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-14 !git clone --branch v0.6.2 https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector.git !cd pgvector && make && make install # Start database !service postgresql start !sudo -u postgres psql -U postgres -c "ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'pass';"

When talking about Vector Databases, in the market we can find the specialized ones and multi-model, most of the major database providers like Oracle, PostgreSQL or MongoDB, for mention some of them, have integrated a specific solution to retrieve vector data.

For this example, I wanted to focus on how pgvector  – an open-source vector similarity search for Postgres – can be used to identify data similarities that exist in enterprise data.

pgvector supports dense vector search well, but it does not have plan to support sparse vector.

There's an issue in the pgvector repo about someone having several ~10-20million row tables and getting acceptable performance with the right hardware and some performance tuning: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/issues/455

I'm in the early stages of evaluating pgvector myself. but having used pinecone I currently am liking pgvector better because of it being open source. The indexing algorithm is clear, one can understand and modify the parameters. Furthermore the database is postgresql, not a proprietary document store. When the other data in the problem is stored relationally, it is very convenient to have the vectors stored like this as well. And postgresql has good observability and metrics. I think when it comes to flexibility for specialized applications, pgvector seems like the clear winner. But I can definitely see pinecone's appeal if vector search is not a core component of the problem/business, as it is very easy to use and scales very easily

The Spring AI project aims to streamline the development of applications that incorporate artificial intelligence functionality without unnecessary complexity. On this example we use features like: Embedding, Prompts, ETL and save all embedding on PGvector(Postgres Vector database)

Official GitHub repository of the pgvector extension

pgvector 0.6.0 was just released and will be available on Supabase projects soon. Again, a special shout out to Andrew Kane and everyone else who worked on parallel index builds.

The pgvector extension adds vector similarity search capabilities to your PostgreSQL database. To use the extension, you have to first create it in your database. You can install the extension, by connecting to your database and running the CREATE EXTENSION command from the psql command prompt: