Computer vision and artificial intelligence have been used for years in the media and entertainment industries—but thanks to recent advances in deep learning, the potential applications of image recognition are broader than ever before. What’s more, these technological developments coincide with an explosion in the use of images and videos, especially for marketing and advertising purposes. It’s estimated that 1 trillion photos were taken in 2015 alone, and posts with visual content receive 94 percent more visits and engagements than text-only posts.
Over the past decade, computers using deep neural networks have been able to approach—if not exceed—human performance at object recognition tasks. In 2015, the PReLU-Net deep network became the first computer model to surpass human accuracy on the ImageNet 2012 dataset, with 4.94 percent error compared with humans’ 5.1 percent.