The development of cutting-edge visual search software is set to become a powerful new business tool. New techniques from the likes of Google, Microsoft and a range of smaller start-ups are allowing users to trigger increasingly successful searches using images rather than text. When combined with the immediacy of mobile technology - eg, by searching with pictures taken with the camera of a smartphone - the ecommerce and online marketing potential is enormous.

For example, a photo of a white goods machine taken by a shopper can trigger a search on a product comparison website and lead them to the most keenly priced item online. And using the Amazon Remembers feature on the company's iPhone App, customers can create a visual list of things they want to recall; if an item is a product, Amazon will try to find a match and make an offer.

The technology also enables pictures to become the interface to digital content, so that a photo of an advertisement can be a direct hyperlink to a branded content portal - without the need for unsightly barcodes or symbols. Mobile marketing specialist LinkMe Mobile, whose visual search technology is used by clients including Nestlé, Fiat and Barnes & Noble, claims conversion rates of 25% when such techniques are used in advertising campaigns.

The software behind visual search and image recognition is now achieving with surprising accuracy what humans do so well: detecting similarity in images. Engineers have been working on this challenge for decades, their biggest problem being that objects can take on different visual forms when viewed from various angles. Now, as well as using keyword tags and other text-based image-related descriptors, current-generation technology gets round this by employing algorithms to handle complex geometries that recognise an object regardless of the angle the image was captured.

Next up, Google is working on coupling its Goggles app (currently being beta tested on its mobile Android platform) with Google Translate. Very soon a travelling executive will, for example, be able to input a photograph of a restaurant menu into Goggles, and have the text instantly translated into a variety of languages.

Data Feed

• Based on its own research, Microsoft claims that consumers can process search results with images on average 20% faster than text-only results.

• Mobile marketing and visual search specialist LinkMe Mobile claims that, in independent testing, its visual search algorithm 
is 96% accurate.

• The visual search app developed for bookseller Barnes & Noble by LinkMe Mobile has over 1.5 million users.