OREANDA-NEWS. Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a leading global provider of imagery and music, today introduced innovative search and discovery features powered by its own custom-built convolutional neural network. Reverse image and advanced visually similar search capabilities for images fully launch today and Shutterstock will soon launch visually similar discovery for video.

The first application of this neural network manifests in Reverse Image Search, which provides an innovative alternative for customers as compared to using keywords to search for images in Shutterstock's collection. Today, users can simply upload a photo of their choosing from Shutterstock's collection or from another source, and the algorithm will detect and then, in an instant, provide images similar in look and feel to the original, overcoming the limitations of keyword search.

"We're continuing to build industry leading technology to improve our offering. With a collection as vast as Shutterstock's, the importance of being able to surface exactly what a customer needs with advanced search and discovery tools is essential to our continued success." said Shutterstock's founder and CEO Jon Oringer. "Doing this in video is a breakthrough and as the technology continues to learn and recognize what's inside an image or a clip, it promises more possibilities. We know we've only scratched the surface in how we use this deep machine learning to better understand and serve our customers."

Computer vision is the ability for a computer to break an image down into its primary characteristics, both visually and conceptually that can be represented numerically. The technology relies on pixel data within images - rather than metadata collected through keywords and tagging - to help identify and surface relevant content.  

Shutterstock's computer vision team, that built and tested this technology entirely in-house, was put together over a year ago to solve the challenges associated with visual search. Because Shutterstock is one of the industry leaders with more than 70 million creative assets, this computer-vision technology has been crafted, honed, and optimized for its collection unlike any other to reach the marketplace. All the data Shutterstock collects on each image, download and search has provided the necessary gas to fuel this super-charged engine.

About Shutterstock, Inc.
Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), is a leading global provider of high-quality licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations, videos and music to businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations around the world. Working with its growing community of over 100,000 contributors, Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of images each week, and currently has more than 70 million images and 4 million video clips available.

Headquartered in New York City, with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Denver, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Paris and San Francisco, Shutterstock has customers in more than 150 countries. The company also owns Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media provider; Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world's media; and WebDAM, a cloud-based digital asset management service for businesses.