Cortexica Makes Choosing Shoes Much Simpler

The fashion industry uses the latest available technology to get customers to buy its products and services, and shoes are no exception. Cortecxa Visual Systems Ltd., a London based leading provider of cloud-based image recognition systems and mobile visual search technology, has developed the first software in the world that lets consumers find and purchase the perfect pair of shoes. The new technology was demonstrated at the first FashTech event at the Google Campus in Shoreditch, London in which many different fashion technology start-ups were highlighted.

The company is using its FindSimilar search platform by leveraging a patented technology able to integrate mobile applications of any fashion brand or retailer to conduct searches. By simply taking a picture of an item, such as a pair of shoes, it is able to find similar items from a database of inventory. According to the company the technology is able to mimic the process that is found in the human visual cortex to recognize an image from a library of digitally captured images and videos.

FindSimilar for Shoes can look for a range of shoes from the same image a person has taken and find characteristics such as shape, color, and design. Consumers can take pictures from anywhere including magazines, televisions or even a person walking down the street and conduct a search to determine where it can be purchased. Even if the exact pair of shoes is not found, it presents retailers with opportunities to sell consumers other products they might have not considered before.

Cortexica created a powerful and cloud-based visual search platform leveraging visual inference engines and object recognition algorithms that recognize images by learning and evolving like the human brain. The system was created by visual search scientists, machine learning engineers, and neuroscientist by reverse engineering specific subsets of human visual cortex and modeling the responses of neurons. This allows users to conduct a robust visual search for very accurate exact match searches in images and video.

"Staying one step ahead of fashion is a constant challenge for many but we believe our technology helps consumers to do exactly this. Once the search engine is embedded in an app, the software has the ability to help shoe shoppers narrow their search and make better choices, this could result in them finding similar and often better items available elsewhere," Iain McCready, CEO of Cortexica stated.