Images are a substantial part of most patents and carry important information about the invention. But analyzing a patent's image data has often involved tedious manual work, like flipping back and forth between the patent drawing figures and looking for the matching parts in the description. In some cases, IP professionals would manually copy and paste the names into the drawings. 

We saw the obvious opportunity to improve the search experience using the latest Computer vision technology and are happy to present the feature Smart reference numbers, which basically displays the descriptions on top of the images. This is what it looks like:

To save you some neck pain, we added an auto-rotate function to tilted images. And if it’s an image with many descriptions or if the descriptions sit close, you can switch to the on-hover mode for a better overview.

The feedback from our users has been very positive. We have received many suggestions for further enhancements of the functionality, and the algorithms improve constantly, so stay tuned. Happy searching!