Image Matcher 2.0

A brand new image matcher for more accurate hits

Neki Sham avatar
Written by Neki Sham
Updated over a week ago

The image matcher is one of our core technologies at COPYTRACK, and it’s also one of the most complex. Our legacy image matcher churned out good results, but our goal was to further improve our matching software to reduce the number of mismatched hits in your inbox.

Over the past few months, our IT experts have worked tirelessly to drastically optimize your search results and their hard work has paid off. All new hits captured since January 8, 2020 were found using our new Image Matcher 2.0, which delivers more accurate results to all of our customers.

Our legacy image matcher was built with a focus on feature comparison technology. Every image was analyzed, and the main features of images were extracted via complex calculations. This set of extracted features was then compared to those of another image; if most features from both images were the same, then the images ended up in your inbox as a hit.

By contrast, our new matcher is based on the analysis of differences between images. A difference image is created when one image is superimposed onto another. In the areas where the two images are not identical, the difference image shows the difference in the pixels of both images.

Our system then analyzes the difference images and determines whether the differences are caused by changes to the original image (example 1) or if both images simply do not match (example 2).

Example 1: Difference image matching images: 

Example 2: Difference image of non-matching images:

This new technology makes it possible to compare entire images rather than just key features, which in turn produces more accurate hits. On average we have now increased our accuracy to 95%.

Furthermore, we were also able to re-evaluate existing inbox hits (those hits which had not yet been categorized). Every customer now has a clean inbox and benefits from our new matching technology. If you want to see what our new matcher has cleaned up from your inbox, check out your “No match” folder and filter by the “auto no match” tag, or simply click the following link: https://app.copytrack.com/hit/list/no-match#tag[]=3168

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