The cuckoo bird is famous for laying its own eggs in the nests of other bird species. The cuckoo baby’s first instinct when it is born is to push the eggs of other birds out of the nest to get all the food and attention from the mother bird.
Digital Cuckoos Use Logos and Watermarks
The digital equivalent of cuckoos in the online real estate market is companies that place their own photographs of available properties on websites they do not own. It has historically been impossible to ferret out every photograph that did not belong on a website.
Now, computer vision software gives website managers the power to effortlessly police online property listings. The artificial intelligence (AI) solution flags images posted on websites by uninvited real estate agencies.
The key to determining whether a photograph belongs to one’s website or to another company is a visual identifier on the image. Most photographers and companies place watermarks and logos on pictures they distribute across the Internet.
Watermarks are transparent objects laid over top images, often placed in the middle of a photograph.
Logos are typically opaque.
Digital license holders use the imprints to promote their own brands and to protect the images from unsanctioned redistribution. Also, watermarking and embedding logos on photographs increases the creator’s chances of claiming damages if the graphic is used without permission or royalties.
Digital cuckoos may place logos anywhere on photographs, and may even vary the sizes of their logo across the catalog of their images. The quality control issues sometimes make the images look unprofessional.
The Benefits of Calling Out the Digital Cuckoos
Digital cuckoos make shrewd calculations: they know that the internet portals of some real estate agencies have thousands of images to police. They also know it is humanly impossible to identify every photo with a watermark or logo that a competitor lists on a host’s website.
So digital cuckoos become more daring. They take up increasingly more digital real estate on the websites of other agencies. Unwitting companies eventually find they are paying for unscrupulous businesses to advertise on their website.
Bad quality watermarks and logos on photographs loaded onto websites can also impact the visual appeal of online platforms. A website’s poor presentation can affect a host company’s credibility and drive away potential clients.
Computer vision can quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively reveal the photographs of digital cuckoos. Subsequently, host companies can choose to ban uninvited guests from their websites.
Website owners can also charge a premium to agencies that want to promote properties through host platforms.
What is Computer Vision and Why Is Restb.ai’s Unique?
Computer vision software searches out, identifies and tags individual objects within a digital photograph. Restb.ai’s computer vision solution takes that technology one step further by detecting logos and watermarks laid over photographs.
Logos are difficult to spot because they tend to be unique, do not necessarily exist in any searchable database of images, and can be irregular in shape. Watermarks are even more difficult to distinguish from underlying images; it is also difficult to tell where a watermark ends and the original picture begins. Sometimes it seems as if foreground and background objects actually fuse.
Restb.ai’s leading-edge computer vision software identifies non-conforming watermarks and logos and tags them for host companies to see and act on.
Protect and Profit from AI Computer Vision
Cuckoo birds have been nudging competing birds out of ecosystems for thousands of years. While digital cuckoos have been raiding property listings for a relatively short time, computer vision software promises a defense against further invasion -- and a potential new stream of revenue to website owners.
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