Hello, Visual Discovery!
Immense amounts of data and information are available today, and tomorrow there will be even more. And that is the problem. With such large data sets, we are facing a hard time understanding the information that lies in them. But the best opportunities are the hardest to see. The challenge is to find the treasure, and visual discovery has always been one important facet of this challenge.
If you look around, observe for sometime and then try to recollect, you will recall images of your surroundings. Even the text you remember while reading a book is through images of the pages in the book. Our brain functions in such a way that it is easy to make sense of the world through sight, and visual discovery is the perfect answer to the brain’s craving for discovering new information.
People have identified the importance of human vision in various fields and studied how appealing visual content is to our eyes. Therefore, we see a lot of applications of categorizing images and describing them in any way possible. A simple example would be to categorize your photos which you are too lazy to do yourself. A lot of surveillance activities require identifying objects and recognizing activities in images and videos. More complicated tasks involve describing an image or a video in words or speech without any additional information beyond the image itself.
A couple of decades ago, we would be thinking of all this as science fiction or something we would only watch in movies. But, today we have the technology and resources to realize this and much more. How? Well, a lot of factors have contributed to the massive success that technology has had in this field. But Image Recognition Technology and Computer Vision have impacted the area of visual content in ways we did not imagine before, and the benefits of these technologies have only just begun to make their way into our everyday lives.
Image Recognition
Image Recognition has started to revolutionize technology because of its vast applications. Want to identify a person or an object in the image? You got it. Identify the landscape in the image? That too. Which category should I keep this image in? Well, Image Recognition can suggest. And this is not all. The reason why Image Recognition is a big success is because of the way it has been built. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have given it a great start. In the future, with better availability of computing power and resources and with discovery of new algorithms and techniques, I expect a lot more than what we see today.
Where do we see the miracles of this technology happening today? Google has created an image recognition software to process and identify images. So have many other technology companies like IBM and Microsoft. But how do we as consumers exploit this technology and take advantage of the awesome experience it delivers?
At galleri5, we have stepped up to harness this technology and create a platform for visual discovery — to help you find and collect amazing visual content on topics of your interest. You discover beautiful content related to your interests, and something might just inspire you to do your next thing — like travel to an offbeat location, cook a nice dish, try out a fashion idea or redecorate your home. So you can keep building your ‘visual wishlist’ on galleri5 — collect whatever ideas and content inspire you, and come back to it when you want to.
Now what if you have clicked a beautiful photo of a place you discovered on your last offbeat trip? You add the photo to galleri5 and would like people interested in offbeat experiences to get inspiration from it. So you’ll be looking to tag the photo to relevant galleries (topics). With so many galleries (there are more than 1500 of them), you may think of this as a tedious task, and if you miss out on some relevant ones, you might miss the opportunity to inspire some relevant audiences and also earn some Karma points for doing so! Here comes Image Recognition to the rescue.
galleri5 has used Image Recognition technology to look inside the photos and gather contextual information about them. Where was the photo taken? What objects lie in it? What part of the day it could possibly be captured at — dawn or dusk? What genre might the photo belong to? Practically all the information that you as someone viewing a photo might look for. Using this information, galleri5 will suggest galleries to which you might want to tag the photo. Tagging to galleries is very powerful, because it not only tells what is in the photo, but also suggests ideas that anyone can get inspiration from.
Further, when someone discovers your photo later, the image recognition technology suggests more galleries in the form of ideas & interests they can collect this photo to.
Apart from suggesting galleries — which will highly improve the way content is organized and discovered, in the future, users may be able to use this information to search for other similar photos. We all know that searching for visual content with words can be a very painful and irritating task especially when one does not have the right words to describe an image. Image recognition provides ways to deal with this.
The idea of galleri5 is to use technology to deliver something not thought of before — to change the way visual content discovery platforms work, to change the expectations users have and to give them tools to discover visual content in a more intuitive and simple way.
And this is just the start. We have plans to make heavy use of technology in order to personalize your experience on galleri5, to help you find things you are looking for, to help you take better photos (note how this is different from applying filters after taking a photo — something Instagram has gotten us much used to!), to help you discover stuff related to the photos that you take, and so on.
