Offering all kinds of shoots for all kinds of businesses, Spyne has made a unique spot for itself in the tech-driven startup industry in just two years. Founded by Sanjay Kumar and Deepti Prasad the journey of founding it is as interesting as the concept of the startup itself.
As Sanjay shares with Analytics India Magazine, they initially built a smart content distribution platform for wedding photographers to help them manage millions of raw and edited images. The white-labelled platform for publishing images and videos online took off instantly as photographers started sharing all their content with their clients using this platform.
With this increased popularity came the need to manage humongous data. This is when they started exploring multiple possibilities to organize data smartly and built several Computer Vision and AI processing technologies to further help photographers reduce their time and effort in organizing their work.
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How Does The AI-based Image Editing Work
As Sanjay explains: Image editing involves a series of steps executed by expert editors. It involves focus object extraction, background change, automatic shadow application, retouching, adjusting margins to colour corrections. Most of these steps are pretty much defined in nature for specific categories of images, say e-commerce or food.
“We have built specific AI algorithms that solve independent problems and then created a comprehensive application stitching independent actions to produce an output that is very close to the final output,” says Sanjay.
A quality checker manually scans the image and eventually does the required corrections before finally publishing the image. Image editing algorithms are exposed to these correction methods to further improve its accuracy. “With each editing, our software is becoming smarter and more efficient,” he says.
The company applies tech automation at every possible step of the image processing chain giving them an immense advantage over other players who use manual ways of producing the final output.
Computer Vision And Image Processing Technology At Spyne
Not just AI but the company also uses Computer Vision and Image processing technology to tackle other problems such as managing terabytes of data kept with photographers, sorting through the best images out of thousands of images and more.
“Other than helping photographers sort their content, we have also built technologies that understand the specifications of guidelines of images published on standard marketplaces such as Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon etc. Our technology processes the images using 20+ checks and highlights the issues at the root saving hours spent in manual QC of images,” explains Sanjay.
Computer Vision is also used by the company to curate millions of photos stored by photographers on Spyne by faces, timelines, locations to present beautiful galleries of photographers that present them in a way they like to be showcased. The smart sorting and image similarity identification algorithms help photographers reduce their final album creation time by days easily.
A strong tech team leads this exceptional work at the company. They have over 15 members in the tech team to look after AI and data-driven applications. “We are looking to build further strength in tech and product in the coming 2-3 months. Idea is to build a strong product portfolio, which will establish us as a strong company catering to all important use cases for our end clients,” says Sanjay.
Deep Tech Solves The Challenges In Photoshoots
High-quality images and videos of products and services are the key drivers of all businesses. Photoshoots done by thousands of freelancers or different studios lack uniformity or consistency desired by large marketplaces, who have pretty much straight forward guidelines of shooting images.
“Ensuring the guidelines manually for millions of images is a herculean task. So, we are building technologies that can help thousands of photographers and companies alike to ensure that guidelines are adhered to and whenever exceptions happen, they are highlighted at the source,” explains Sanjay.
This not only reduces production time and reshoots of products but ensures that the final output is cost-effective, fast and superior in quality compared to traditional methods of manual shoots.
Strengthening The AI Play With Its Recent Funding
Spyne recently raised an undisclosed amount as growth capital in their Pre-series funding. The investment was led by Angellist, Smile Group, Manish Amin (COO, Yatra), Anil Goel (CTO, OYO), Anubhav Sonthalia (CEO, Sokrati), Deepak Mittal (CEO, TO THE NEW), among other entrepreneurs from leading companies in India. The company had raised its seed funding last year, which was led by the Smile Group and other angel investors.
Sanjay shares that with this funding amount the startup is looking to strengthen the Automated Image Processing stack. “Our goal is to offer Auto Editing (we call it Spyne Touch) as a SaaS product to thousands of small and large studios across India and the globe to help them improve on the effectiveness in their editing jobs,” he says.
The company believes that a huge volume of Image processing data will bring in a massive improvement in technology, which will further boost the effectiveness of creating a virtuous cycle for them. Other than images, they are also looking to build Video processing technologies.
“Apart from tech, we are looking to expand our Photography and Studio partner base to about 10K+ spread all across the country including Tier – 2 and 3 cities, which have a dearth of good photo production or image processing capabilities,” shared Sanjay before signing off.
