Now here’s a clever idea for for­ward-look­ing account man­agers from online adver­tis­ing agen­cies: use cut­ting-edge image-recog­ni­tion soft­ware to detect how brand logos are being used in social media photos.

Such tech­nol­o­gy would let com­pa­nies track when, where and how their brands were fea­tured (“visu­al men­tions”). For any skep­ti­cal art direc­tors out there, this tech­nol­o­gy isn’t just a pipe-dream, it’s up and run­ning, thanks to young start­up GazeMetrix.

Move over hash­tags – image recog­ni­tion is here

The firm’s six-per­son team (half based in Moun­tain View, half in New Del­hi) have dropped the noto­ri­ous­ly unre­li­able hash­tag method of detect­ing what’s fea­tured in social media pho­tos: instead, its unique image-recog­ni­tion soft­ware can lit­er­al­ly see what’s in the pic­ture. Hash­tags gen­er­ate a lot of fake leads, cap­tur­ing pho­ny accounts and fake updates, volu­mi­nous spam and oth­er irrel­e­van­cies. GazeMetrix dis­pens­es with those prob­lems completely.

Although it’s cur­rent­ly focused on Insta­gram, plans are afoot to devel­op func­tion­al­i­ty for Face­book and Twit­ter. Brands can not only see how their logos are rep­re­sent­ing them but con­tact users to obtain per­mis­sion for repub­lish­ing the cutest or coolest images on their own channels.

The idea grew as an off­shoot of an ear­li­er inven­tion devised by the startup’s three founders while work­ing for a cloud-com­put­ing firm in New Del­hi. They’d devel­oped an app capa­ble of let­ting users install oth­er apps sim­ply by point­ing their device at anoth­er mobile gad­get. But they couldn’t make the idea fly, although in the process they had come up with image-recog­ni­tion soft­ware as a side­line.  And that’s when the idea of GazeMetrix was born, back in August this year.

A unique means of brand tracking

The start­up fol­lows in the foot­steps of anoth­er com­pa­ny which has man­aged to incor­po­rate image-recog­ni­tion soft­ware suc­cess­ful­ly in its social media ana­lyt­ics: Curalate, whose plat­form was devised for Pin­ter­est and has gen­er­at­ed inter­est from a wide range of agen­cies and brands.  For the time being, how­ev­er, Curalate appears to be con­tent to stay with Pin­ter­est only.

28-year-old co-founder Deo­brat Singh says that he and his col­leagues are using the startup’s U.S, pres­ence to woo poten­tial cus­tomers state­side, but the firm already has a Turk­ish ad agency amongst its clien­tele that proac­tive­ly signed up for its services.

GazeMetrix cur­rent­ly has $140,000 in seed fund­ing and is cur­rent­ly track­ing 25 brands, includ­ing Star­bucks, Coca-Cola, Google, Mon­ster Ener­gy, BMW and Corona.