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Cyclops [SMART 100, 2017]

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This SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during the entry process. As a function of entry, applicants were required to declare that all details are factually correct, do not infringe on another’s intellectual property and are not unlawful, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Some profiles have been edited for reasons of space and clarity.

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1. THE BEGINNING

This innovation initially came to life when…

Carsales has always valued data and knowing more about cars and consumers than anyone else, but we realised that we knew next to nothing about the many millions of car images on our site.

During one of our Hackathons in November 2016, a team decided to see if they could extract the car angle from an image. Was it a side view? Or was it the dash? Or the front?

The team successfully built a system called “Cyclops” that answers this question and won 1st place!

2. WHAT & HOW

The purpose of this innovation is to…

…automatically extract the angle of a photo allows carsales to display car images in a consistent sequence to make visual comparison easier, inform sellers of missing angles, and be able to highlight (hot spot) unique features of their car.

It does this by…

Cyclops uses a supervised learning algorithm that is trained to recognise certain angles of the car. As more and more photos are analysed it continues to learn and improve. The current accuracy is 97.2%. Cyclops is also learning about features of cars so in the future we will be able to highlight any that are unique.

3. PURPOSE & BENEFITS

This innovation improves on what came before because…

…photos were not shown in a consistent sequence, nor can we inform sellers that their adverts are missing a specific photo angle that might be important for that model.

Now with Cyclops, this classification process is all done automatically. Our internal photography team has seen a 10% increase in their own productivity due to Cyclops automating this tedious task.

Its various benefits to the customer/end-user include…

Cyclops allows us to show images in a consistent sequence making visual comparison much easier, and allows us inform sellers of missing photo angles. Furthermore, we can now build image sets confident that all angles are present.

4. COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

In the past, this problem was solved by…

We had to rely on the customer to know which photo angles were important and upload them in a consistent format. Both were very error prone.

Its predecessors/competitors include…

We do not know of any other system that can do car photo angle detection.

5. TARGET MARKET

It is made for…

Cyclops is made for detecting car photo angles – which is particularly useful for any car applications or websites, where customers generate image content themselves. Relying on customers to classify and order images correctly is very error prone, so being able to have this feature 100% automated allows for a significantly improved customer experience.

Cyclops has been built as a standalone API in AWS, so it can be utilized by any of our applications around the world with little integration overhead.

It is available for sale through…

Currently, Cyclops is for internal use within carsales only. In the future we may expose this as a public API and charge based on usage.

Our marketing strategy is to…

We plan to roll out these features through our Web and Mobile applications. Customers will soon see the extra functionality when selling or buying a car, bike, or boat.

FINE PRINT: This SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during the entry process. As a function of entry, applicants were required to declare that all details are factually correct, do not infringe on another’s intellectual property and are not unlawful, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Some profiles have been edited for reasons of space and clarity.

Maven Judge Vote: 150 Percent – Smart 100 2017
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