Incogna’s Shopachu.com website implements a complex computer vision algorithm to allow users to “Find Similar Products” with nothing but an image to go on, and uses the power of NVidia’s CUDA libraries to make it happen in real-time.
Visual Guided Navigation starts by analyzing the patterns, shapes, texture and color in images to help cluster and associate similar-looking images. This process is complex and computationally intensive, with many variables that have to be taken into account, such as lighting, camera angle, background noise and photo quality. In fact, this sort of computer vision problem is still an intensively researched topic today, and Shopachu is one of the few commercial deployments to have scaled the algorithms successfully.
See a video demonstration of the system after the break.
From this clip it is impossible to say anything about search engine quality. It is widely known in computer vision, that objects like shoes (especially on such a simple white background) are very easy for image analysis. I have my own “home made” image classifier and I always demonstrate it on shoes: the quality is equal to the presented here.