Image Recognition in eCommerce

What is Image Recognition?

Image recognition is a type of AI automation used to recognize people, places, objects, logos, and more using pixel and pattern analysis in images. This type of AI software has become exceptional at recognizing people, with accuracy exceeding 99%, which is comparable to the ability of humans.

How does Image Recognition Work?

The effectiveness of image recognition depends on the classification of images. Classification involves pattern matching with data. Images are data in the form of 2-D matrices. Image recognition is all about classifying data into one category out of many. Optical character recognition (OCR) is an important example, which works to convert images of typed or handwritten text into machine-encoded text.

In the image recognition process, the main steps include gathering and organizing data, building a predictive model, and using the model to recognize images.

Why is Image Recognition Important for eCommerce Businesses?

ECommerce has been rapidly growing in recent years, especially now due to COVID-19. In 2020, consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants. 

ECommerce websites focus on content management to better develop their listings and increase sales. Visual data supplies a lot of information for eCommerce sites. Companies can now use AI and image recognition to increase the efficiency of their content management team and send personalized content for each of their shoppers. 

How Does Image Recognition Help Online Shoppers?

Online shoppers can now simply upload an image of an item they are searching for and find thousands of products that fulfill their needs using image recognition apps like CamFind. This means there’s no reason to go from store to store asking an employee which aisle your item is in and then leaving the store with an item you aren’t satisfied with.

Additionally, social media channels can help identify objects. Image recognition technology is able to differentiate between products, objects, and even facial expressions. For example, Instagram’s algorithm identifies images of products people like and suggests ads accordingly. Shoppers become more knowledgeable about different products by viewing these personalized ads.

Facial recognition technology can be used to detect whether or not an individual likes an item by analyzing the person’s facial expressions after they’ve submitted a picture. This allows for efficiency in helping shoppers choose products that they are content with.

How Does Image Recognition Help Businesses?

ECommerce sites can use image recognition to detect and remove inappropriate content, including explicit content and counterfeit products. This technology can be used to spot nudity and explicit content in the images that customers upload for reviews. Additionally, logo recognition technology enables eCommerce sites to spot fake logos that are trying to pass as legitimate brands. This technology automatically flags the products so that shoppers do not continue to purchase.

What Image Recognition Software are Businesses Adopting?

Cloud Vision API

Google’s Cloud Vision API does the most common image recognition tasks, including object recognition and recognizing explicit content.

Additionally, the Cloud Vision API employs Google’s extensive data and machine-learning libraries. This facilitates the detection of landmarks and identifying objects in images. 

Cloud Vision API also features OCR recognition. With this technology, printed and handwritten text can be extracted from an image or PDF file.

Amazon Rekognition:

Amazon’s Rekognition API also does object recognition and explicit content detection. Additionally, it has features that enable video processing. There is also a Celebrity Recognition feature, which is helpful for websites that display pop culture content.

The Capture Movement feature tracks an object’s movement through a frame, which is beneficial for video processing.

The Detect Text In Image feature is useful for static image processing. The Rekognition API also analyzes images for text.

Marketing and advertising companies have adopted this software to categorize and tag large catalogs of photos and videos for easy searching.

IBM Watson Visual Recognition:

IBM’s Watson Visual Recognition API integrates an image recognition API with machine learning. With this technology, users can build, train, and test custom machine, learning models.

This software includes pre-trained object detection models, including:

• The General Model, which provides a classification for thousands of predefined objects.
• The Explicit Model, which detects inappropriate content.
• The Food Model, which identifies food objects in images.
• The Text Model, which recognizes text, similar to Amazon Rekognition.

Partner with Pyxl

Image recognition is a beneficial tool for eCommerce businesses. Pyxl’s development team has years of experience with designing and developing enterprise-level eCommerce websites and can help you figure out what image recognition software is best for the growth of your eCommerce business. Contact Pyxl today to see how we can help streamline your business with automation!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022