eBay Inc.
Intelligent online personal assistant with image text localization

Abstract:

Systems, methods, and computer program products for identifying a candidate product in an electronic marketplace based on a visual comparison between candidate product image visual text content and input query image visual text content. Unlike conventional optical character recognition (OCR) based systems, embodiments automatically localize and isolate portions of a candidate product image and an input query image that each contain visual text content, and calculate a visual similarity measure between the respective portions. A trained neural network may be re-trained to more effectively find visual text content by using the localized and isolated visual text content portions as additional ground truths. The visual similarity measure serves as a visual search result score for the candidate product. Any number of images of any number of candidate products may be compared to an input query image to enable text-in-image based product searching without resorting to conventional OCR techniques.