The Design and Implementation of a Real Time Visual Search System on JD E-commerce Platform
This addresses the practical need for scalable visual search in e-commerce, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing distributed and indexing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of real-time image retrieval on JD.com's e-commerce platform by designing a visual search system that supports sub-second search times across hundreds of billions of product images and handles frequent updates.
We present the design and implementation of a visual search system for real time image retrieval on JD.com, the world's third largest and China's largest e-commerce site. We demonstrate that our system can support real time visual search with hundreds of billions of product images at sub-second timescales and handle frequent image updates through distributed hierarchical architecture and efficient indexing methods. We hope that sharing our practice with our real production system will inspire the middleware community's interest and appreciation for building practical large scale systems for emerging applications, such as ecommerce visual search.