Image recognition for business – how to use it to your advantage.

Recent times have seen the image recognition market emerge and transform. The market is now forecasted to reach $38.9 billion by 2021. Clearly the demand for this technology is only increase, but why?

Industries tend to differ completely with how they use technology. From improving the customer experience to streamlining operational procedures, Precision Printing — a specialist in litho printing

• explores how the software works and why it could enhance business.

Image recognition technology explained

Image recognition technology is designed to retrieve, process, examine, and interpret pictures, photos and high-dimensional data. It takes this from the ‘real world’ and produces useful information in multiple formats. This ranges from uploading a photo of a group of friends to Facebook that automatically tags each person to their accounts, to taking a digital fingerprint scan in order to determine a person’s identity.

Partly because 80% of the content online is visual, image recognition technology is rapidly growing and is becoming more and more adept at mimicking human vision and understanding.

What makes it beneficial for business?

Many companies, no matter which industry they are operating in, now have a digital presence. Whether they use social media or have an e-commerce site, digitalising your business has become something that is key to success. Image recognition software is benefiting industries across the board. A major advantage of this technology is that it can offer real-time insights into consumer behaviour — but not only your consumers. Visual analytics will allow you to monitor the consumer behaviour of your competitors, which will allow you to address their concerns within your own campaigns and potentially attract them to your brand instead.

Keeping up to date with online competitors is essential — but difficult. With image recognition software, you can now find similar content to what your brand is putting out on social media and track down social mentions of your company — no more manual, time-consuming searches. Not only will this help you monitor the competition in your industry, but it will also allow you to be more responsive to marketing opportunities that would otherwise have been missed and pick up on trends that may be flying under the radar.

Image recognition in individual industries

Healthcare

Image recognition software is also a useful tool for healthcare professionals. The technology is currently being used to help process the huge numbers of medical images that need verifying and checking in the sector. As a result, doctors can diagnose conditions and diseases at faster rates and with great accuracy, meaning less stress for the patient and easing the pressure on the doctor when it comes to arranging the best course of action.

Fashion

Image recognition promises to play a major role in the fashion industry. Firstly, a consumer, when leafing through a magazine, can use image recognition software on their mobile device to scan a product they’re interested in and land straight onto its product page or relevant online marketing content, which could increase the chances of a conversion. Similarly, consumers can upload images of clothes they like and shop online for similar or complementary products — streamlining the shopping experience.

From a brand perspective, image recognition makes picking up on trends much easier and quicker — due to the rapid evolution of trends in this sector, this could prove invaluable.

Automotive

The automotive industry is also benefitting from image recognition technology. Self-driving vehicles are an emerging market and they’re being developed with the assistance of image recognition. To ensure that self-driving cars are safe, they need to be able to detect hazards immediately and make informed decisions regarding their next action to avoid causalities. That’s where image recognition comes in. With this technology, self-drive car sensors will be able to spot dangers on the road in the same way as a human motorist does, reacting in a way that should avoid crashes and accidents.

Although we’re still a while away from having motorways full of self-driving vehicles, image recognition is certainly already playing a part in the automotive industry and will help some brands in the sector capitalise on a trend that may be huge in the future.

Image recognition is a rising technology that is forecasted to benefit companies on many levels. Are you clued up on how it can help your business in 2018?

Phoebe Leylanis a copywriter, a content writer and web content optimiser, Ms. Leyland has built a strong foundation in writing as a graduate from the University of East Anglia, with an undergraduate BA hons in History and Politics and MA in Marketing