Imagine looking at a beautiful dress in a magazine or while window shopping in a mall, clicking on a picture and finding it easily online with hundred more recommendations and options. Sounds far-fetched? Not quite. Some e-commerce majors are making this reality for their customers with a power of computer vision.
Flipkart recently announced the launch of an ‘Image search’ feature on its mobile app, designed for its fashion category. Voonik and Craftsvilla, two growing e-commerce sites, have also reportedly joined the bandwagon of image search capabilities, where the company’s entire catalogue can be searched using images instead of textual inputs provided by the user.
“With Image Search feature, users will get more apt search results while shopping online. They just need to click a picture or use a photo on their phones to find fashion products of same colour, pattern or style on Flipkart. It will reduce the search/ browsing time, making the overall product discovery and shopping experience simple,” said Flipkart’s Chief Product Officer Punit Soni, in a statement.
So what is IMAGE SEARCH?
Behind this seemingly simple feature is a computing feat. Computer vision, the newest technology in the Indian e-commerce space, is a growing discipline of computer science where computers are enabled with massive computing power to recognise images.
Traditionally, recommendations have worked with meta data tags which someone has to manually put in identifying different aspects of a clothing. For example, color, pattern, and sleeve etc. The recommendation engine itself would look for similar clothes to the one being viewed based on the tags and then provide the results.
The other method has been collaborative filtering, which looks at the outfit the user is looking at and then says ‘Others who looked at this outfit, viewed these as well’. The visual search and recommendations technology analyses colour, pattern, gender, category of the clothing visually, and pulls up visually similar clothes to the one being viewed by the user. This also allows the company to generate tags automatically as opposed to needing someone to manually tag aspects of clothing.
“That might work for other categories like electronics or books. But for fashion, visual search provides a clear advantage,” Sujayath Ali, co-founder and CEO of Chennai-based fashion retailer Voonik, was quoted as saying.
Flipkart’s Image search feature is currently at the beta stage of development. It will be available to customers through an app upgrade.
“This is in line with our ambition to create a very intuitive thoughtful mobile experience that is universally accessible to everybody, and there will be more such innovative features and developments in the coming months,” said Flipkart’s Soni.
With these e-commerce giants investing heavily on computer vision technologies, it will be interesting to see that how this will add to the advantage of online shopping and overall customer’s experience.
For more on computer vision, watch this space.
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