As long as social media is integrated more and more in our life, visual become more predominant! Hence, social platforms need to develop ways to detect and classify image and video content, enabling them to better surface relevant posts in search.
From this point, Facebook has been working on its advanced image recognition tool, which can now automatically categorize images based on their content.
For example, if you run a search for “white horse photo” Facebook’s system able to “see” whether there’s a white horse in a photo, and search based on that, even if the photo wasn’t tagged with that information. You can also search for a location or event.
This is just the start of Facebook’s image recognition tools have evolved, contain text overlaid on an image. Is it possible for Facebook to extract that text and use that as another data point, this is the focus of Facebook’s new Rosetta text in the images detection system, which covers not just memes, but any text contained within an image posted on Facebook or Instagram.
The Rosetta system, Facebook says, is already extracting text from “more than a billion public Facebook and Instagram images and video frames (in a wide variety of languages), daily and in real time”.
That’s a huge amount of extra data points, which will facilitate a wide range of uses. For one, it’ll provide more context for visually impaired users, while it will also enable better search and discovery of relevant content, based on visuals.
For brands, the technology could also have significant utility. A couple of examples:
- In being able to search for images based on text, you could find people who already buy your products, or related products, if those items are visible in the background of images. This could enable you to reach out to these users with related offers.
- If image data is provided as another insights tool, you could gain more perspective on your target audience by cross-matching their product purchases (based on image recognition) with their other usage and demographic data points, helping to target your outreach.
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These advancing processes provide a whole new range of research and discovery implications, but with the volume of visual posts increasing, it’s likely the text in image tools that will provide the most significant shift.
The next stage, then, is the identification of content within video posts, which Facebook has also been developing, and is improving on every day.
The capacity to search through the billions of posts and updates across Facebook and Instagram each day, based on more advanced methodology, will open up a huge range of new opportunities. It takes times, but Facebook’s systems are advancing and will provide increased utility on this front in the very near future.
By Hesham Mahdy / Digital Marketing Manager / Eureka Digital