NVIDIA Co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, on this new technology

Cortexica Vision Systems, a provider of cloud-based image recognition systems and visual search technology, announced the commercial availability of “Visual Fashion Finder,” a mobile visual search solution for the fashion industry that uses the company’s patent-pending Find Similar™ technology, and can be integrated into the mobile applications of any brand or retailer. Visual Fashion Finder allows consumers to take a picture of an item of clothing or fashion accessory with a mobile device, and automatically finds similar items from a database of inventory.

Instead of searching by text or drop down menus, Visual Fashion Finder allows shoppers to search for clothes and accessories by uploading a photograph of what inspires them to their favorite brands’ and retailers’ Cortexica Find Similar™-enabled mobile apps. Within seconds of submitting photos, users receive a comprehensive list of products that are similar to their submission in colour, pattern and texture.

Find Similar™ technology is part of Cortexica’s bio-inspired visual recognition platform. It mimics processes found in the visual cortex within the human brain to recognize content from digitally captured images and videos.

“When a user submits a photo using Visual Fashion Finder, we have to overcome a variety of technical challenges in a seamless way to make this an easy to use end-user experience,” said Cortexica’s CEO, Iain McCready. “These include poor lighting conditions and visual ‘clutter,’ reflections, background scenery, and other people or objects in the photo. Cortexica’s Find Similar™ technology is designed to focus in on what users are looking for and ‘see’ images in the same way that the human eye sees them. Much like human visualization, our technology adapts superbly to challenging conditions, enabling the recognition of the image and, thus, returns an accurate match.”

Cortexica’s Visual Fashion Finder and Find Similar technology rely on NVIDIA GPUs to identify and match images. The technology was first demonstrated at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on March 19, 2013, during the keynote address by NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who commented, “This is really fantastic technology that takes visual search to the next level – this will take shopping for fashion to a whole new level.”

Visual Fashion Finder, Find Similar™, and Exact Match technologies are now commercially available as a hosted service for integration into fashion retailers’ and brands’ mobile and online applications.

Fashion retail readers – what do you think?