ViSenze has partnered with Taiwan’s Rakuten Ichiba to launch a state-of-the-art visual fashion search and recognition service on Rakuten’s social and shopping sites in Taiwan.
ViSenze is a NUS spin-off company that has developed intelligent visual tools, which provide visual search, match and recommendation functions on web and mobile platforms.
In this new partnership, ViSenze’s technology is powering the novel Fashion Finder application on two sites: www.oshare.com.tw and www.rakuten.com.tw/event/funsearch.
This allows users to search and buy similar fashion items that they see on the sites, from user-generated photos and from user-uploaded images, which could be taken from fashion websites or e-magazines.
“Rakuten is always on the look-out for like-minded partners and innovative technologies to accelerate our business,” said Toru Shimada, senior executive officer and CEO of Rakuten Asia.
“As the first in Taiwan to roll out this feature, we cannot wait to see how our customers in Taiwan will react. Rakuten looks forward to offering this unique feature to our customers in other parts of Asia and beyond.”
ViSenze’s intelligent visual search and recognition technology is engineered to help digital businesses in e-commerce, online advertising, affiliate marketing as well as social networks solve real-world challenges in an exploding visual web world. Digital businesses and consumers benefit in a number of ways from ViSenze’s technology:
- Similarity search enables e-commerce companies to let their customers find what they are looking for more efficiently. When online shoppers browse the merchandise, they are subtly recommended visually similar items, based on category, style, colour, pattern – increasing the chances of converting discovery browsing into purchases.
- Intelligent image matching tool allows users to upload photos from websites and e-magazines to find clothing, bags, shoes and accessories similar to those worn by their favourite celebrities, or to upload a picture of their desired fashion item and find the same or similar products.
- Visual-contextual application helps advertising networks and exchanges analyse how online users engage with visual content on the web, in order to render contextual advertisements, or to re-target consumers with an advertisement based on images previously viewed.
- ViSenze’s cloud based multi-platform technology enables the above services to be made available to users on-the-go, at anytime and from anywhere, on web, mobile or social networking sites.
ViSenze differentiates itself from other visual search companies, as its technology can recognise a wide range of key objects in images and isolate them from a cluttered image background for more targeted analysis and matching. This means that ViSenze is able to handle different types of images, including those with complex backgrounds, as well as also perform accurate recognition and matching to visually related or similar products.
This capability enables the company to deploy its technology quickly to different verticals, through rapid and adaptive machine-aided learning techniques, and generate intelligent visual driven business analytics to help enterprise clients make sense of how their visual assets are used.
In addition to Rakuten, ViSenze’s cloud based technology has also been deployed on Singapore-based Clozette, a fashion social shopping network that is using ViSenze’s technology to offer “find and buy similar” recommendation for fashion items.
“ViSenze aims to unlock the intelligence in visual content and create innovative visual search applications for different businesses across different platforms,” said ViSenze CEO Oliver Tan.
Founded in 2012, ViSenze was originally developed by the NUS-Tsinghua Extreme Search Centre (NExT), a leading research centre jointly established by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Tsinghua University of China.
