A new technology which has come out of 7 years of research in Imperial College, London mimics how the human brain processes visual signals. Cortexica, the company behind the technology, hopes to find a home with many of the fashion companies that would use the technology to allow people to identify and ultimately purchase clothing they take photos of on television or in public.
The technology can also perform 360-degree object recognition, identify logos that are as small as .4% of the screen, and identify videos. In the future Cortexica hopes to reduce latency, improve recognition accuracy, and add more search categories.
Cortexica is also working on enabling an “always on” mobile device that will constantly be identifying everything around it, which is both cool and a bit creepy. With mobile chips like Logan and Parker coming in the future, Cortexica hopes to be able to do on-device image recognition, which would greatly reduce latency and allow the use of the recognition technology while not connected to the internet. UK retailers Waitrose and Tesco are both trialling Cortexica with Tesco producing a wine finder app a couple of years ago.
