What are the unmet market needs for visual search today?

Visual search technology takes source image content and finds visually similar content in a target database of image or video content. Traditional visual search technology on the market today generally doesn’t have adequate performance – the results in many cases aren’t similar, judged from a human perspective. That’s why there really hasn’t been a break out market leader, though a lot of companies have certainly tried. Getting computers to perform visual search well (like a human) is much harder than it sounds. Additionally, there are some major scalability problems with traditional visual search methods, known as indexing. These approaches worked OK from an IT scalability perspective when the target database to be searched was a few hundred thousand images. Today, many emerging image and video applications require search across millions of images, and traditional technology cannot address those needs. So the major unmet needs are 1) visual search performance is not human like, and 2) scalability is a big obstacle.