Brand Protection
online brand protection

How Image Recognition is Changing Brand Protection

Today, our lives are surrounded by images. Our digital world is made up of trillions of images — searching, browsing, shopping – making brand protection that much harder. Enter image recognition.

A subcategory of computer vision, image recognition software identifies and categorizes image data to detect regularities. This detection is fueled by AI algorithms that enable machine learning in the understanding of pixel patterns. 

With the ability to capture and record minor discrepancies in visual media, image recognition is used to analyze oncoming trends, search by image, attribute tagging in relation to e-commerce products, and aid in brand protection.

So, How Does Image Recognition Brand Protection Technology Work?

Once engaged, image recognition classifies, detects, tags, and segments elements of an image, gathering exact or like images in the search platform of choice. 

    • Classification: identification of the category, or class, in which an image is grouped. Think dress vs pants in an online store. 

    • Detection: localization of a specific attribute in the image that is bound to isolate corresponding accuracy.

    • Segmentation: analyzation with a higher degree of precision, locating attributes to the nearest pixel in an image.

    • Tagging: recognition of several attributes in an image. For example, the color, length, and style of a dress. In the case of an online store, this allows shoppers to narrow down their product hunt. 

Benefits of Image Recognition for Brand Protection

Increased Brand Trust

You put years into the development of your product and service. All for bad actors to steal and profit off of those ideas in a matter of days. The search for this copyright infringement across an entire platform to locate all instances of abuse is quite impossible…for a human that is. Brand Protection Software with advanced image recognition technology  can do so in mere minutes. In detecting, recommending, and eliminating instances of brand abuse, your team is securing brand trust. 

Reducing Financial Losses

In 2022 alone, $1B worth of counterfeit items were seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And this doesn’t even cover the infringements on intangible services. In taking a proactive approach, image recognition technology will identify the source of brand misuse. When used with brand protection software, this allows you to reduce your financial losses.

How Image Recognition Software Protects Brands

Monitoring Online Marketplace Activity and Combating Counterfeit Goods

Bad acting extends past the misuse of a legal term. Complex networks go as far as producing tangible, counterfeit goods. With image recognition, you can detect instances of infringement across the entire digital landscape. Your brand protection team can then step in and eliminate the bad actor, network, and production of their products.

In addition to the simple digital detection of a counterfeit product, additional segmentation of that image can reveal location references of where that product is.

Monitoring Brand Use and Combating Online Infringement

What used to be manual is now automated. Image recognition software can be used to continuously analyze selected digital landscapes to identify instances of copyright infringement across wordmarks, logos, products, and more.

Challenges of Image Recognition

Technology limitations

With trillions of images to search through, thousands of image hits and massive amounts of data storing, significant disk space and bandwidth is non-negotiable. Often, the result is the need for more computers and higher levels of network space to increase processing speed. All this makes it difficult for you to undertake image recognition on your own.

Image Quality

Image quality is easily summed down to pixel count — a key factor in image recognition. The more pixels, the more there is to detect, isolate, and tag. If a source image at a low or medium quality is used, image recognition software is immediately at a disadvantage to finding all instances of abuse.

Image Variations

One shot of a 3D product will lead to detection of that one angle. Viewpoint coupled with lighting variation is key to feeding a successful image recognition search — you never know what type of picture the bad actor put out there. Covering as many variations as possible leads to a comprehensive image search.

In addition, the background noise in an image also distracts from the key focal point — the copyrighted item. If bad acting images don’t focus on a key product, detecting said image is that much more difficult.

Scalability

The digital landscape is massive. From varying social media platforms, to search engines, to websites, scaling image recognition for brand protection across platforms is not an easy task. That in addition to technology limitations creates a barrier to using this image recognition.

Opportunities of Image Recognition for Brand Protection

Implementing Robust Image Matching

Obtaining the technology, automating image recognition, and scaling it across platforms offers a robust method in image matching. Implementing across your products, services, and marks leads to comprehensive brand protection. It’s about more than finding that one product — it’s about protecting your brand, in its entirety, across an entire digital universe. 

Leveraging Machine Learning

Image recognition software fed by machine learning leads to a constantly evolved and innovative process tailored to your unique company. What does that mean? Faster detection, accurate results, and efficient enforcement.

Automation of Brand Monitoring

As a proactive tool, image recognition software can be automated for constant brand monitoring across platforms. With the right image recognition software, what would be constrained to a workday is evolved into a 24/7 operation. No matter when or where a bad actor uploads an infringing image, automated image recognition will detect that image.

Conclusion

Image recognition is a tool that can not only aid in brand protection, but will save a company money and increase customer trust. However, harnessing the full capabilities of the technology is not an easy task. 

Offering the accuracy, speed, and efficiency you need in your brand protection, Tracer will automate and scale image recognition for brand protection. Through machine learning, our AI-based brand success platform constantly innovates our Human-in-the-Loop technology to produce a proactive model tailored to each client’s brand success. 

Protect Your Brand With Image Recogntition Technology.

Author

Tracer Team