Trademark Image Similarity Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network

A trademark is any recognizable sign that identifies products/services and distinguishes them from others. Many regional and international intellectual property offices are dedicated to dealing with trademark registration processes. The registration process involves examining the trademark to ensure there is no confusion or interference similarity to any other prior registered trademark. Due to the increasing number of registered trademarks annually, the current manual examining approach is becoming insufficient and more susceptible to human error. As such, there is potential for machine learning applications and deep learning, in particular, to enhance the examination process by providing an automated image detection system to be used by the examiners to facilitate and improve the accuracy of the examination process. Therefore, this paper proposed a trademark similarity detection system using deep-learning techniques to extract image features automatically in order to retrieve a trademark based on shape similarity. Two pretrained convolutional neural networks (VGGNet and ResNet) were individually used to extract image features. Then, their performance was compared. Subsequently, the extracted features were used to calculate the similarity between a new trademark and each of those registered using the Euclidean distance. Thereafter, the system retrieved the most similar trademark to the query according to the smallest distances. As a result, the system achieved an average rank of 67,067.788, a normalized average rank of 0.0725, and a mean average precision of 0.774 on the Middle East Technical University dataset, which displays a promising application in detecting trademark similarity.