Trademark Image Similarity Search

Abstract

A trademark may be a word, phrase, symbol, sound, color, scent or design, or a combination of these, that identifies and distinguishes the products or services of a particular source from those of others. One of the crucial steps both prior to filing of the trademark applications as well as during the review of these applications is conducting a thorough trademark search to determine whether the proposed mark is likely to cause confusion with prior registered trademarks and pending trademark applications. Currently, the trademark applicants or their representatives and examining attorneys manually search the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database that contains all of the active and inactive trademark registrations and applications. This search process relies on words and Trademark Design codes (which are hand annotated labels of design features) to search for images, thereby limiting the overall search process to primarily text-based search. For marks having image characteristics, users visually look at the image and other design characteristics and compare it with existing registered or pending trademarks to determine its uniqueness. Overall, the process of exhaustively looking at all the images that are categorized using a specific design code, while comprehensive, may take a substantial amount of time.