Pinterest Visual Search

In 2014, I built infrastructure for image feature extraction and object detection at scale to power visual search at Pinterest. We published a paper at KDD 2015 describing how visual search worked at that time.

Talk at KDD 2015 on Visual Search at Pinterest with co-author Andrew Zhai.

Visual Search at Pinterest

Yushi Jing, David Liu, Dmitry Kislyuk, Andrew Zhai, Jiajing Xu, Jeff Donahue, Sarah Tavel

Abstract: We demonstrate that, with the availability of distributed computation platforms such as Amazon Web Services and open-source tools, it is possible for a small engineering team to build, launch and maintain a cost-effective, large-scale visual search system. We also demonstrate, through a comprehensive set of live experiments at Pinterest, that content recommendation powered by visual search improves user engagement. By sharing our implementation details and learnings from launching a commercial visual search engine from scratch, we hope visual search becomes more widely incorporated into today’s commercial applications.

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