Bing Image Search often gives us a new experience when it comes to bringing the best search results. This time, Bing image search will go beyond the text queries. Now, Bing image search will become a Bing Visual Search. This is an extension to the capability of Bing that they call the ‘Search By Image’ capability. This was introduced by Bing several years ago and it allowed users to specify an entire image to be used as a search query. Bing has moved even further from this amazing capability. Bing image search will now let users search for a certain object they saw in an internet image or the one they photographed.
Bing Visual Search
So how does this work? Bing Visual Search is the perfect example of the image recognition ability introduced by Microsoft several years ago. Bing Blogs gives us an example of how Bing Visual Search works.
“Let’s say you are looking for kitchen decoration inspiration, and an image attracted your attention. You click on a thumbnail result to get to the ‘Detail View’. You really like the overall décor, but you are particularly interested in that nice-looking chandelier. Would it be possible to see where you can get one just like that? With Bing Visual Search, now you can!”
So as per above example, the Detail View will let you see a magnifying glass symbol in the top left of the image. Bing calls it as the ‘visual search button’.
Further, you need to click on the visual search button’s ‘visual search box’. You can click and drag this box to adjust it to cover just the object of your interest. You can also simply draw a box around the chandelier if that’s more convenient. When you do so, Bing search engine will present several images of the chandelier. Thus, with the new ability, Bing image search not only recognizes the image you selected, but also searched similar images for you.
Bing has given the technical details of this Bing visual search:
“The major difference is that now instead of query terms, we need another way to represent the query-image. Once the query understanding phase is complete, the subsequent steps in the execution of the query are similar. As a first step in the query-image understanding process, we run Image Processing Service to perform object detection, extraction of various image features including DNN features, recognition features, and additional features used for duplicate detection.”
Bing Visual Search is truly an amazing ability to search images with image-query. Read more about this on Bing Blogs.