The Design and Implementation of a Real Time Visual Search System on JD E-commerce Platform

TL;DR

This paper details the design and implementation of a real-time visual search system capable of handling hundreds of billions of images on JD.com, supporting sub-second retrieval times and frequent updates.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable distributed architecture and efficient indexing techniques tailored for large-scale, real-time e-commerce visual search systems.

Findings

Supports real-time search with hundreds of billions of images

Achieves sub-second retrieval times

Handles frequent image updates efficiently

Abstract

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.