Question: I am using Perceptual hashing technique to find near-duplicate and exact-duplicate images. The code is working perfectly for finding exact-duplicate images. However, finding near-duplicate and slightly modified images seems to be difficult. As the difference score between their hashing is generally similar to the hashing difference of completely different random images. To tackle this, I tried to reduce the pixelation of the near-duplicate images to 50x50 pixel and make them black/white, but I still don't have what I need (small difference score). This is a sample of a near duplicate image pair: Image 1 (a1.jpg):  Image 2 (b1.jpg):  The difference between the hashing score of these images is : 24 When pixeld (50x50 pixels), they look like this:  rs_a1.jpg  rs_b1.jpg The hashing difference score of the pixeled images is even bigger! : 26 Below two more examples of near duplicate image pairs as requested by @ann zen: Pair 1  Pair 2  The code I use to reduce the image size is this : from PIL import Image with Image.open(image_path) as image: reduced_image = image.resize((50, 50)).convert('RGB').convert("1")  And the code for comparing two image hashing: from PIL import Image import imagehash with Image.open(image1_path) as img1: hashing1 = imagehash.phash(img1) with Image.open(image2_path) as img2: hashing2 = imagehash.phash(img2) print('difference : ', hashing1-hashing2) 

Answer: Here's a quantitative method to determine duplicate and near-duplicate images using the sentence-transformers library which provides an easy way to compute dense vector representations for images. We can use the OpenAI Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) Model which is a neural network already trained on a variety of (image, text) pairs. To find image duplicates and near-duplicates, we encode all images into vector space and then find high density regions which correspond to areas where the images are fairly similar. When two images are compared, they are given a score between 0 to 1.00. We can use a threshold parameter to identify two images as similar or different. By setting the threshold lower, you will get larger clusters which have fewer similar images in it. A duplicate image will have a score of 1.00 meaning the two images are exactly the same. To find near-duplicate images, we can set the threshold to any arbitrary value, say 0.9. For instance, if the determined score between two images are greater than 0.9 then we can conclude they are near-duplicate images.  An example:  This dataset has 5 images, notice how there are duplicates of cat #1 while the others are different. Finding duplicate images Score: 100.000% .\cat1 copy.jpg .\cat1.jpg  Both cat1 and its copy are the same. Finding near-duplicate images Score: 91.116% .\cat1 copy.jpg .\cat2.jpg Score: 91.116% .\cat1.jpg .\cat2.jpg Score: 91.097% .\bear1.jpg .\bear2.jpg Score: 59.086% .\bear2.jpg .\cat2.jpg Score: 56.025% .\bear1.jpg .\cat2.jpg Score: 53.659% .\bear1.jpg .\cat1 copy.jpg Score: 53.659% .\bear1.jpg .\cat1.jpg Score: 53.225% .\bear2.jpg .\cat1.jpg  We get more interesting score comparison results between different images. The higher the score, the more similar; the lower the score, the less similar. Using a threshold of 0.9 or 90%, we can filter out near-duplicate images. Comparison between just two images   Score: 91.097% .\bear1.jpg .\bear2.jpg    Score: 91.116% .\cat1.jpg .\cat2.jpg    Score: 93.715% .\tower1.jpg .\tower2.jpg  Code from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util from PIL import Image import glob import os # Load the OpenAI CLIP Model print('Loading CLIP Model...') model = SentenceTransformer('clip-ViT-B-32') # Next we compute the embeddings # To encode an image, you can use the following code: # from PIL import Image # encoded_image = model.encode(Image.open(filepath)) image_names = list(glob.glob('./*.jpg')) print("Images:", len(image_names)) encoded_image = model.encode([Image.open(filepath) for filepath in image_names], batch_size=128, convert_to_tensor=True, show_progress_bar=True) # Now we run the clustering algorithm. This function compares images aganist # all other images and returns a list with the pairs that have the highest # cosine similarity score processed_images = util.paraphrase_mining_embeddings(encoded_image) NUM_SIMILAR_IMAGES = 10 # ================= # DUPLICATES # ================= print('Finding duplicate images...') # Filter list for duplicates. Results are triplets (score, image_id1, image_id2) and is scorted in decreasing order # A duplicate image will have a score of 1.00 duplicates = [image for image in processed_images if image[0] >= 1] # Output the top X duplicate images for score, image_id1, image_id2 in duplicates[0:NUM_SIMILAR_IMAGES]: print("\nScore: {:.3f}%".format(score * 100)) print(image_names[image_id1]) print(image_names[image_id2]) # ================= # NEAR DUPLICATES # ================= print('Finding near duplicate images...') # Use a threshold parameter to identify two images as similar. By setting the threshold lower, # you will get larger clusters which have less similar images in it. Threshold 0 - 1.00 # A threshold of 1.00 means the two images are exactly the same. Since we are finding near # duplicate images, we can set it at 0.99 or any number 0 < X < 1.00. threshold = 0.99 near_duplicates = [image for image in processed_images if image[0] < threshold] for score, image_id1, image_id2 in near_duplicates[0:NUM_SIMILAR_IMAGES]: print("\nScore: {:.3f}%".format(score * 100)) print(image_names[image_id1]) print(image_names[image_id2])