by Angela Guess
Paul Sawers reports in VentureBeat, “Shutterstock is flexing its AI muscles with the news that the stock photo giant is introducing new computer-vision search smarts to its platform. The company, which is headquartered in New York’s Empire State Building, went public back in 2012 and now offers more than 70 million images for bloggers and media outlets — which can make searching for specific assets challenging. Of course, the trusty old keyword search tool is effective to an extent, but what if you want to find images that are similar to one you have in your possession? Or what if you want alternative images based on color schemes, mood, or shapes? This is where Shutterstock’s new reverse image search comes into play.”
Sawers goes on, “Computer vision is essentially an arm of artificial intelligence that lets machines analyze and understand images by breaking them down and processing them on a pixel-by-pixel basis, rather than by meta data (such as keywords and descriptions that rely not only on human actions, but on human accuracy too). Shutterstock put together a computer vision team more than a year ago, and this is the first fruits of its labor. The main search box in Shutterstock now offers an option to upload or drag and drop an image.”
photo credit: Shutterstock