"street style" visual recognition prototype

“Visual search is finally here,” so said New York-based Liz Bacelar during a panel discussion
about the future of shopping at the annual SXSWi festival recently in Austin, TX. Bacelar is
founder of Decoded Fashion, a group that aims to foster creative partnerships between startups,
fashion designers and retailers. Cortexica are a retail fashion image-recognition company,
and we presented on the same panel, and were hailed last week in an article by the Financial
Times as being a “visual search pioneer”.
The simple idea is that anyone can snap an image of a jacket on a mobile phone and
Cortexica’s software can isolate the pattern on that jacket and then search for other kinds of
garments with an exact or similar pattern. It’s an intuitive enhancement of an already existing
shopping behaviour (product search). Instead of hunting out your dream item, the most
suitable products can find you – based on a single image. The technology originated in
Imperial College London, and uses software developed during a seven year long research
project by bioengineers exploring how the human brain processes images. Since 2009,
Cortexica have developed the technology into a number of products whilst continuing to
improve the core aspects of the technology.
As we are gaining more traction, it is becoming evident that our end-users are trying to push
the capability of the present technology that is centred around product images. As users try to
take a picture in a normal setting with a shop window or city background or worn by their
friends and acquaintances, the current system cannot distinguish the product in the image
amongst all the other complex visual elements. We therefore need to enhance the system to
work on “street style” fashion images. This will allow our product to cross-over into a new
area of need which is now being demanded by the end-users and retailers alike. As far as we
are aware, there is no product or technology out there that is addressing this need.