Visual recognition technology for images – What is it and how does it work?

Visual recognition is one of the most important techniques in the digital world. If you don’t understand image recognition or its applications, you should read this post in detail. Image recognition has become very common and in trend in the past few years, all because of the rise of smartphones, professional camera devices and of course the modern technology. Today different industries, including automobiles, gaming, and ecommerce, are using this advanced technology. 

What is visual recognition technology?

Image recognition or visual recognition is an advanced technique that helps computers identify people, places, objects, subjects, or actions in an image. In the past, image recognition was only used to identify the contents of an image. Still, today things have become much more advanced. Today you would see OCR, pattern matching, facial recognition, license plate matching and even scene identification algorithms powered with the image recognition concept.

Visual recognition can be referred to as the eyes used by the computer as you would use yours to see, analyze and understand a particular object or subject. You should understand that when it comes to identifying images or the contents on them, we as humans can easily analyze each and every part of the image and this is because our mind has been unconsciously trained for it.

Now contrary to how the human brain works and how you understand images, computers are absolutely different. The computers see visual content as an array of binary numbers. You would be surprised to know that visual recognition technology used by computers or other digital devices today use binary codes and numerical arrays to understand an image.

How does image recognition work?

If you are new to the concept of visual recognition then you would be surely interested to know how this technique actually works. Well in this section we are going to explain how visual recognition technology works in a generic and simple way.

If you talk about images from a computer’s perspective then you must know that a digital image would be a matrix of numbers. The numbers or the binary patterns actually represent the data which is associated with the quality of the image.

Now these number patterns actually provide detailed information to the recognition systems about the location of pixels along with the neural networks joining them. Visual recognition is all about advanced technology and algorithms. Some of the popular algorithms used in this technology are scale-invariant feature transform system, speeded up robust features, Principal component analysis, and Linear Discriminant analysis.

Some common challenges faced in visual recognition

It is true that visual recognition technology is being used in lots of industries today but it is also a fact that there are some limitations and challenges faced by this tech!

• Viewpoint variation is one of the most common challenges of image recognition. In the real world, images are seen in a different angle and direction but when such images are entered in the visual recognition systems then they can be understood in an inaccurate way.
• Scale variation is another challenge which occurs because of the size of the image and how the system views it.
• Deformation challenge occurs because of blurry image content. If an image is deformed then it is going to confuse the visual recognition system.

There are many more challenges and problems in the visual recognition system. Nevertheless let us now talk about the most popular uses of this technology today.

Two useful and common applications of visual recognition technology!

Reverse Image Search

Reverse image search technique is the one which allows you to search by image instead of text. Reverse photo lookup uses visual recognition and content retrieval technology to analyze and understand the image input. The image is broken down in binary code by the visual recognition technology and the code is compared to the visual database of multiple search engines. With the help of reverse image search you can find out millions of similar or relevant image based results within seconds. This was considered to be impossible in the past. Today the reverse image search technique has  dozens of applications in the digital world.

Optical character recognition

OCR is another technique which uses image recognition algorithms. Technique and the tools based on it are basically used to extract textual data from an image. If you have an image or handwritten notes that you want to turn image to text then you can always take help from the OCR tools. The ocr tools are capable of understanding the image and the data in it. After analyzing all the information these tools can easily get you all the visible text from the image file. The modern OCR tools are powered by AI so there is a very little room for error!

These are the two most common applications of modern day visual recognition algorithms. You can use the reverse image search and optical character recognition tools for free on the web today!