Zebra Technologies’ Researchers Finish Among Top Teams in Global Computer Vision Challenge

Team demonstrates how computer vision could help transform e-commerce online shopping

BOURNE END, United Kingdom – July 13, 2022 – Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: ZBRA), an innovator at the front line of business with solutions and partners that deliver a performance edge, today announced a team of Zebra AI researchers in the United Kingdom secured second place in one of the world’s most prestigious computer vision challenges. Challenge team rankings were announced in June at the CVPR RetailVision workshop designed to address problems in e-commerce online searches.  

“When a consumer logs onto an e-commerce website and starts searching for items of clothing, for example, the website will return a range of results, some better matched than others,” said Andrea Mirabile, Senior Manager, Computer Vision, Zebra Technologies, who led the Zebra team.

Sponsored by the Alibaba Group and Trax, the CVPR 2022 Challenge: Large-scale Cross-Modal Product Retrieval brought together 650 research teams from across the world to work on a large-scale multimodal retail dataset of around five million image-caption pairs of circa 100,000  products. Each team was tasked with finding the top-K product candidates to match a query such as ‘blue men's turtleneck sweater.’

“From the consumer point of view, it’s a less than optimal experience, with time and effort wasted, that could result in either no order, ordering the wrong item, or having to look elsewhere,” added Mirabile. “From the perspective of the retailer, it’s about the problem of how to better use words, images, and search functions that match what consumers are looking for when they shop and being able to make more relevant product recommendations.”

Top-K is a common measure of performance in machine learning and computer vision. In the context of limited and noisy data, such as retail data with a mixed range of image quality and text captions, the use of a loss function (the function that computes the distance between the current output of an algorithm and the expected output) designed for top-K classification can bring significant improvements.

“AI applications cover speech, text, sound, and vision. Our challenge team and the wider Zebra global AI research team is bringing those together, in the same way a human uses their five senses to sense and analyze the world around them to inform decision-making and action,” explained Mirabile.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Zebra’s computer vision researchers ranked second out of 650 teams in the prestigious global CVPR Computer Vision Challenge.
  • The challenge seeks to address problems faced by consumers and retailers around e-commerce online searches.
  • Zebra’s computer vision team is pioneering multimodal approaches to AI, bringing together several AI applications for sensing, analyzing, and acting.


ABOUT ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES

Zebra (NASDAQ: ZBRA) empowers organizations to thrive in the on-demand economy by making every front-line worker and asset at the edge visible, connected and fully optimized. With an ecosystem of more than 10,000 partners across more than 100 countries, Zebra serves customers of all sizes – including 94% of the Fortune 100 – with an award-winning portfolio of hardware, software, services and solutions that digitize and automate workflows. Supply chains are more dynamic, customers and patients are better served, and workers are more engaged when they utilize Zebra innovations that help them sense, analyze and act in real time. Zebra recently expanded its industrial automation portfolio with its Fetch Robotics acquisition and increased its machine vision and AI software capabilities with the acquisitions of Adaptive Vision, antuit.ai and Matrox Imaging. Zebra is #25 on Newsweek’s inaugural list of America’s Most Loved Workplaces and #79 on Forbes’ list of America’s 500 Best Midsize Employers. Learn more at www.zebra.com or sign up for news alerts. Follow Zebra’s Your Edge blog, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and check out our Story Hub: Zebra Perspectives.

Media contact
Daniel Blackman
+44 (0)7408 864 597
Daniel.Blackman@zebra.com

Industry Analyst Contact:
Kasia Fahmy
Zebra Technologies
+1-224-306-8654
k.fahmy@zebra.com

ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2022 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.