This AI Start-up Will help You Ape Celeb Fashion Trends Very few companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are presently using AI in images

Ever wanted to dress up like a celebrity? Or maybe you wanted to own attire, which you recently saw someone wearing but didn't know where to get it from? Artificial Intelligence is the technology you need. This tool identifies your clothes and finds the place where you can buy it from.

Gurgaon-based start-up Staqu Technologies Pvt. Ltd is redefining image search through AI. Launched in 2015 by Co-founders Anurag Saini, Chaitan Rexwal, Pankaj Sharma and Atul Rai, the start-up utilizes state-of-the-art deep learning technologies to provide precise, reverse image search solutions.

The search engine is designed to retrieve exact matches from the indicated database for an input image. Various algorithms like content, color, shape and texture are extracted and fused together to provide visual search solutions for various e-commerce businesses in the field of fashion, housing, medicine etc.

In a chat with Entrepreneur India, Atul Rai, also the CEO of Staqu explained how AI is making fashion images searches simpler.

"Over 70 per cent of the content of e-commerce sites is images. Very few companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are using AI in images. Every company, be it an original equipment manufacturer (mobile companies) or e-commerce, is generating certain kind of data. We are trying to extract information from that image data and decode it for different purposes," Rai said.

AI Image Search

Rai said most people don't find a product similar to what they have seen on TV or found someone wearing it, in the market. Using this technology, one can actually spot the same outfit online at a different price.

"Let's take the example of the e-commerce space. Suppose you want to buy an attire which an actress owns, it's difficult for you to get the same as human brain can't describe the design in words. This is where the role of image data comes into play. You can take a picture of the dress you want and find out a similar dress based on the pixel information instead of text information," he stressed.

Rai's start-up is selling the technology to e-commerce companies and mobile phone brands to integrate the same within the mobile phone camera.

"We have joined hands with a company that has launched cell phones called Karbonn Fashion Eye and Aura Note2 which use our image search feature. We are also working with smartphone brands like Intex and Panasonic," he added.

How Staqu Knows a Particular Brand

Elaborating the role of AI in Staqu , Rai stressed that image search was not the only segment in which they are working right now. The start-up is offering various services like visual search, automated meta-tag generation, visual recommendation, real time video processing etc.

"If you go to Flipkart and look for any dress of a particular brand, the brand name is a text which has to be there. For that, a lot of companies are putting human curators, and it is turning out to be very costly affair. As for every product you have to put some tags for the ease of searching them. This is where AI services are required, where you just have to upload the image and start generating relevant tags for that particular product," he said.

Rai concluded by sharing a useful advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, who are looking to lead the race in the artificial intelligence segment. "To start something in AI one should have skill and experience because you need to have the knowledge of understanding the type of technology that can solve a specific issue," he said.