Marketers are always trying to get inside the head of customers to find out what a brand name causes them to think or feel.

"Now, the question is whether we can leverage the billions of online photos that people have uploaded," said Kim.

Digital cameras and smartphones have made it easy for people to snap and share photos from their daily lives, many of which relate in some way to one brand or another.

"Our work is the first attempt to perform such photo-based association analysis," Kim said.

"We cannot completely replace text-based analysis, but already we have shown this method can provide information that complements existing brand associations," said Kim.

Kim and Xing obtained photos that people had shared and had tagged with one of 48 brand names. They developed a method for analysing the overall appearance of the photos and clustering similar appearing images together, providing core visual concepts associated with each brand.

They also developed an algorithm that would then isolate the portion of the image associated with the brand.

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