With the ubiquity of cellphone cameras and video equipment, the world is awash in footage. Advances in artificial intelligence have made processing images and video scalable far beyond human capabilities.
Image analysis software employs machine learning to deconstruct images and return data about everything contained therein. It can be trained to look for specifics, such as a speeding car on a traffic camera or facial expressions in a retail setting, and return the desired results. Brands aren’t taking this technology lying down, though. They’re finding ways to put it to good use and elevate their real-time consumer intelligence.
Here, we’ll look at image analysis software, including a definition and examples. Specifically, we’ll touch on:
- What is image analysis software?
- Five leading image analysis platforms:
- NetBase Quid
- Syte
- Microsoft Azure Computer Vision
- Amazon Rekognition
- Clarifai
Before we get going – here are a few statistics to set the stage:
- The image analysis software market was worth $26.2 billion in 2020. It’s forecast to reach just shy of $85 billion by 2028 while boasting a CAGR of 16.1%.
- On the consumer end, mobile users who reached for image recognition tools the most in 2021 hailed from Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico.
- The global artificial intelligence market is in high demand. The industry was valued at $62.35 billion in 2020 and is projected to grow at an astonishing CAGR of 40.2% through 2028.
Photos and video are a rich resource of consumer and market intelligence for brands and institutions with the capacity to sift through them. And there’s tons to dig through. Artificial intelligence is the key to unlocking intel that informs many use cases. Brands are getting creative in the way they put image analysis software to work. As such, it’s definitely something you want in your toolkit – let’s take a look!
What is Image Analysis Software?
Image analysis software, also known as image recognition or computer vision, processes images to extract details using artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms can be used to identify anything – which provides a variety of applications for brands. For instance, apps like Google Lens allows users to identify plants and animals with their phone camera or snap a picture of an outfit they like and find it online. This sort of image analysis holds a lot of utility for e-commerce brands.
Marketers can use it too. Find some photos that have the perfect vibe for your campaign idea? Image analysis software can break them down to the bare bones, so you’re aware of every detail involved in the image, from mood to the color palate. Think text categorization for pictures. Give your photographer or graphic artist these colors and attributes to design imagery for your social media or ad campaign and capture your vision. That’s not all, though.
Image analysis software can also be used in a social listening capacity to uncover consumer preferences and behaviors. Find how social media users interact with your brand and products through the images they post online. You can also do the same with competitors. Artificial intelligence is trained to find your logo, signage, products, uniforms, etc., so you can see how your brand is represented online. It’s all part of your brand discussion – so you might as well capture it and analyze it for consumer insights.
The market for image analysis software is snowballing as brands find unique ways to grow their brand. The applications are limitless, whether your brand is large or small. Companies hip to the tech are employing it to extract as much intel as possible – and in a variety of creative ways. Robotics and self-driving vehicles are hungry for artificial intelligence capable of processing the visual environment in which they run. That’s a no-brainer. Need to know the scope of your feral cat problem? Image analysis software has your back.
New technology is helping feral cat eradication efforts on Kangaroo Island🔎. The innovative camera system uses 4G technology and image recognition software to provide real time detection of feral cats and wildlife as they move through the landscape. More: https://t.co/rzHtDXqZBD pic.twitter.com/tXihHtrk9C
— @TSCommissioner (@TSCommissioner) November 22, 2021
Whether you’re involved in security, social media, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, marketing, or e-commerce – image analysis software can help you extract insights that level up your awareness. Let’s look at a few tools helping brands dig a little deeper into the visual world.
Five Leading Image Analysis Software Platforms
1. NetBase Quid
Image analysis should be a part of your social listening efforts – full stop. The human brain is built to process images light years faster than text, and that’s why social media is giving everything it’s got to promote visual media. That being the case, there’s a whole lot of consumer intel out there that’s embedded in those cute Instagram posts that tell you more about your customers.
Image analysis software detects attributes within these images to understand and track your visual brand represented on social media. The AI running in NetBase Quid processes over four million images a day, so you don’t have to. Not only that, but it’ll also find your logo anywhere – even if it’s altered, cut off, or reflected backward in a mirror. That’s important because not everybody @’s you.
Adding image analysis to your social listening program increases the precision of your brand analysis. By augmenting text analysis with image analysis software, NetBase Quid can provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what consumers are saying on social media, enabling you to incorporate social insights more effectively into your decision-making process. In simpler terms, image analytics clarifies your brand’s social footprint like a new prescription from the optometrist.
Image analytics is an upgrade to your social efforts, allowing you to track conversational volume and pinpoint your share of voice more accurately. It also ensures your sentiment measurements are on point because you haven’t left half of the conversation out. Your brand is out there in tons of user photos on social media – don’t let them pass you by unnoticed!
2. Syte
Syte is all about product discovery. They use AI to answer one of the consumers’ fundamental questions – where can I get that? Syte’s approach to connecting shoppers with what they love uses AI for image search, personalized product recommendations, and product tagging. That way, they find what they want – fast.
Syte powers product discovery for over a hundred leading brands to take consumers to the next level in e-commerce. Their tools offer image analytics that accelerates the purchase funnel from discovery to purchase.
3. Microsoft Azure Computer Vision
Microsoft is no stranger to innovative tech, and they offer a lot more than an operating system for your computer. Under their umbrella of Azure Cognitive Services, their Computer Vision tool uses AI to label visual content with objects and context, extract text, and provide image descriptions. It also helps you moderate content and decipher how people move in physical spaces using their spatial analysis container – a total win for setting up the perfect display case in your brick-and-mortar that captures attention!
4. Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition uses machine learning to automate your image and video analysis. The tool offers the option to use pre-trained AI for image analysis or a fully customizable alternative to extract targeted insights from your pictures and video.
Uses are robust, including detection of inappropriate content, identity verification, media analysis, and worker safety. Do you need to monitor whether your workforce is wearing proper PPE on the warehouse floor? You can do that. Want to monitor content hosted on your streaming service or implement facial analysis to understand what types are buying your new sunglasses? No problem.
This tool offers a lot of investigative potential for all your visual needs, including celebrity recognition, video segment detection, text in images, face search, trainable image labels, and much more.
5. Clarifai
Founded in 2013, Clarifai has garnered numerous awards, including being named an industry leader in Forrester’s 2019 New Wave Computer Vision Platforms report. Clarifai offers turn-key artificial intelligence solutions to process unstructured images, video, and text into a structured framework.
The cool thing about Clarifai is they offer a slew of pre-trained AI models to get you up and going fast. These include an apparel model to detect clothing and fashion accessories, a demographics model to categorize age, gender, and cultural cues, a weapons detector, facial recognition, food modeling to an ingredient level, and a general visual segmenter, which identifies objects in images down to the pixel level. And these are just a few of many.
Use cases include content moderation, data labeling, surveillance and reconnaissance, video recognition, facial identification, metadata generation and data labeling, predictive maintenance, and visual search. Clarifai is a fantastic solution for the aviation industry, retail and e-commerce, digital asset management, tourism, public sector, and media and entertainment, just to name a few.
If the pre-built models aren’t enough, they also offer a custom model that allows you to create custom machine learning models that can be trained to detect your concepts from images, video, audio, and text. Clarifai is a robust solution for any industry, from brick & mortars to military intelligence.
The capacity to capture and analyze vast amounts of unstructured images for targeted insights is a game-changer for brands and institutions. The market for AI and image analysis software is set to grow exponentially over the next few years. Will your brand be ahead of the crowd? Reach out for a demo, and we’ll show you how image analytics can seriously upgrade your social listening.