If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at how we scaled our visual search technology to billions of images and applied it across Pinterest, please take a look at our Visual Discovery at Pinterest paper that was accepted for publication at World Wide Web (As we developed Lens, we wanted to parallel this experience, so a single real world camera image could connect you to the 100B ideas on Pinterest. Since its launch, we’ve generated billions of objects in just six month’s time, and have used this data to build new technologies, such as Lens and object search. This not only made visual search easier to use, but we also steadily gained a corpus of objects as people saved and selected them. Pinners have responded positively to these improvements and now generate more than 250 million unique visual searches every month.Īs the next evolution of visual search, we introduced real-time object detection. With visual search, we gained a platform to advance our technology and incrementally improve the system by optimizing for not only relevant results but engaging ones, too. In 2015, we launched our first visual search experience which enables people to pinpoint parts of an image and get visually similar results. Here we’ll share how we built Lens and the main technical challenges we overcame. It brings the magic of Pinterest into the real world, so that anything you see can lead to a related idea on Pinterest. Lens enables you to go beyond traditional uses of your phone’s camera–taking selfies or saving a scene–and turns it into a powerful discovery system. Just tap the Lens icon in the Pinterest app, point it at anything and Lens will return visually similar objects, related ideas or the object in completed projects or contexts. Recently, we announced Lens BETA, a new way to discover objects and ideas from the world around on you using your phone’s camera. Building Pinterest Lens: a real world visual discovery systemĪndrew Zhai | Pinterest tech lead, Visual Search

Pinterest lens