How Slyce Solves Visual Search -- Part 1

Slyce was born from a simple vision: What if you could find and buy any product you see, using the technology of visual search on a photograph? Of course, the task of visual product search is born of a more ambitious challenge: Given a query image, how do you determine the most relevant images from a universe of images and presenting them in decreasing order of relevancy? In the case of a traditional search engine, for example, the universe would be all images that are available on the internet. For a social network, it would be all images that were posted or pinned on its website (or app). In our case we elected to focus on solving visual search for retailers, narrowing the universe to be the entire catalog of products that a given retailer sells.