Imagine using your phone to snap a photo of the cool pair of sunglasses your friend is wearing and instantly receiving a slew of information about the shades along with a link to order them.
It is a great idea — but it doesn’t quite work.
Though many companies are trying to make “visual search” a reality, this seemingly simple notion remains elusive.
Photo: Bloomberg
Take Amazon, which made visual search a key feature in its new Fire smartphone. The e-commerce company says the feature, known as Firefly, can recognize 100 million items. It’s similar to a Flow feature Amazon has on its apps for other phones.
So far, Firefly can reliably make out labels of products such as Altoids or Celestial Seasonings tea.
That makes it easy to buy items such as groceries online.
Photo: Reuters
But try it on a checkered shirt or anything without sharp corners, and no such luck.
“It works really well when we can match an image to the product catalog,” says Mike Torres, an Amazon executive who works on the Fire’s software.
“Where things are rounded or don’t have [visual markers] to latch on to, like a black shoe, it’s a little harder to do image recognition.’’
Photo: Reuters
Visual search is important to retailers because it makes mobile shopping a snap — literally.
It’s much easier to take a picture than to type in a description of something you want. Shopping on cellphones and tablets is still a small part of retail sales, but it’s growing quickly. That makes it important to simplify the process as much as possible — especially as people look to visual sites such as Instagram and Pinterest as inspiration for purchases.
“Retailers are trying to get the user experience simple enough so people are willing to buy on their phones, not just use it as a research tool,’’ eMarketer analyst Yory Wurmser says.
Mobile software that scans codes, such as QR codes and UPC symbols, are fairly common. Creating apps that consistently recognize images and objects has been more challenging. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru believes it could take at least three more years.
Since 2009, Google’s Goggles app for Android has succeeded in picking up logos and landmarks. But Google says on its Web site that the app is “not so good” at identifying cars, furniture and clothes in photos.
What’s holding visual search back?
The technology works by analyzing visual characteristics, or points, such as color, shape and texture. Amazon’s Firefly, for example, identifies a few hundred points to identify a book and up to 1,000 for paintings. UK startup Cortexica uses 800 to 1,500 points to create a virtual fingerprint for the image. It then scans its database of about four million images for a match.
Without easily identifiable markers, non-labeled objects are difficult to identify. Lighting conditions, photo quality, distance, angles and other factors can throw the technology off. Visual search works best when there is a clearly defined image on a white background.
Some retailers are finding success with visual search by keeping the selection of searchable products limited.
Target’s new In a Snap app works only with items from its Room Essentials furniture, bedding and decor line. And it works only when snapping a product image in a magazine ad, not when you see the actual product on a shelf. When a shopper scans the ad, items pop up for the shopper to add to a shopping cart.
Heels.com, an online shoe retailer, keeps visual search limited to shoes. Shoppers upload pictures or send links of shoes and are offered similar pairs for sale on the company’s website.
“People shop through images nowadays,” Heels.com CEO Eric McCoy says.
“We want to give them the exact shoe, or something similar.”
So, the race is on to perfect the technology that will create smartphone apps that easily recognize objects in a real-world environment.
Cortexica’s founders spent seven years on academic research before forming the company in 2009. Since then, it has been trying to mold the technology work more like the human brain when it comes to identifying objects.
“Someday you’ll be taking a picture of a whole person, and it will identify the different the things they’re wearing and offer recommendations,” says Iain McCready, CEO of Cortexica.
“That’s really challenging technically, but that’s what people tell me they really want to do.”
The UK company was hired by eBay to develop an app that recognizes cars from behind and matches them with similar cars available on eBay.
Next, eBay asked Cortexica to develop a similar app for fashion. The outcome was Find Similar, which analyzes a clothing item’s color, texture and shapes to find similar items available for sale. Find Similar is now being used by startup app Style Thief and other Cortexica clients.
Superfish, a startup in Palo Alto, California, counts 12 people with doctorate degrees on its staff and has 10 patents for visual search technology. Its technology can be found at PetMatch, an app that matches photos of pets with local pets available for adoption.
Superfish CEO Adi Pinhas believes it will be normal in two or three years to use your smartphone to search for things visually.
“Your camera will be as smart as the rest of your smartphone,” he says.
Once that happens, Forrester’s Mulpuru says, it will “unleash a whole new type of e-commerce.”
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless