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 digital 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.

Many brands now have an app in their portfolio, which is  not a surprise considering that it’s predicted that global gross app revenue will hit $102 billion by 2020.  There is certainly revenue to be generated and customers to be won with apps, but how does image recognition assist? This technology can aid brands in raising engagement levels with their consumers, letting them extend beyond the standard boundaries of online and offline interaction and making the app more immersive. As a result, promotional material and discount offers should be able to pack a greater punch and potentially offer a greater ROI.

How image recognition technology benefits individual industries

Healthcare

This type of technology is very useful for healthcare professionals. Today, the software is being used to assist in processing the numerous 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 is forecasted to make major transformations 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 branding viewpoint, 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 seeing advantages from the use of image recognition software. Self-driving vehicles are an emerging market and they’re being developed with the assistance of this technology. 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 long way away from seeing motorways full of self-driving vehicles, image recognition is certainly already playing a part in the automotive industry. It should be able to help some brands in the sector capitalise on a trend that may be huge in the future.

Image recognition is a rapidly growing technology that looks set to benefit companies on many different levels. Are you clued up on how it can help your business in 2018?

Sources:

https://www.itproportal.com/features/a-guide-to-ai-image-recognition/