Improving the Competitiveness for Enterprises in Brand Recognition Based on Machine Learning Approach45290

To give an example, product brand recognition is to protect the intellectual property in e-commerce platforms, detect the means of transport, or manage a brand of goods on social media G

Improving the Competitiveness for Enterprises in Brand Recognition Based on Machine Learning

Approach

Nguyen Thi Van Trang (1),(*) , Nghiem Thi Lich (1) , Do Thi Mai (1)

(1 ) Thuongmai University, Hanoi, Vietnam

* Correspondence: vantrang1987@tmu.edu.vn

Abstract: Brand identity plays a vital role in business success With the strong development of the

market economy and scientific and technological revolution, there are many new brands introduced

to the market So how can customers identify that brand belongs to what industry or that logo is true

or false? Therefore, the enterprises should have good strategy to enhance their competitiveness, especially in the recognizing brand Logo of the enterprise can be used as suitable objects in computer vision applications for recognizing brands and providing associated services such as logo-based commercial research, and brand trend analysis In this paper, we will present an overview of the brand as well as the importance of brand recognition Then the paper discusses the brand determination by using different approaches, thereby showing the pros and cons of these methods Finally, we propose strategies to improve the competitiveness for enterprises in brand recognition based on machine learning model The results show that our method increased the performance in brand recognition with large input size; conduce to help businesses maintain; expand and improve trust for customers It can also contribute to prevent unfair competition, and enhance the enterprise’s position in the domestic and international market

Keywords: brand recognition; brand attribute; brand trust; deep learning; machine learning

1 Introduction

In recent years, the brand is one of the most interesting topics, especially brand recognition It not only attracts researches, enterprises but also customers With the development of economy, the number of the business is also increasing, in particular,

start-up businesses or small-medium enterprises It leads to significantly increase in setting a new brand every year (Raki et all 2018) According to Abrahams (Abrahams 2016) firms with powerful brands have better stock performance all over the world For instance, Apple is the top global brand with a total worth of 184.154 billion dollars in 2017 (Raki et al 2018) Thus, branding is the main target of company strategy Branding can change how people perceive the company's products It can drive consumers’ decisions when differentiating between competing companies and lead to increase market share and sales

According to American Marketing Association - AMA, brands are defined as

“Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service

as distinct from those of other sellers” (Raki et al 2018) Even though AMA’s definition has

developed over the recent years (Zinkhan 2007), it is still being criticized for focusing on tangible components of the brand For instance, Stern showed that brand is “over-defined and that its meanings are variable” (Stern 2006) Furthermore, Hislop defined the brand as

a “Distinguishing name or symbol designed to identify the origins of a product or service, differentiate the product or service from the competition, and protect the consumer and producer from competitors who would attempt to provide similar products” (Hislop 2001)

In addition, there are numerous brands which have a similarity with other brands such as colors, number of parts or shapes, etc There is a little difference between the brands It may simply differ from other brands by ordering colors, shapes So the recognition of these brands has encountered difficulty with customers It is a serious matter if they are misrecognized Customers may lose their confidence in this brand if they buy some items with a fake brand and its reputation will be affected Branding is a set of marketing and communication approaches that help customers to discriminate an enterprise or goods between competitors aiming to build an impression in customers’ minds for a long time In branding, it is believed that one of the most principal component is logo, especially where this factor is concerned, as it is essentially the face of the company So, this is a reason logo should be designed a professional logo in order to become a powerful and easily memorable, making an impression on a person at first glance The approaches overcoming this problem is to build printed promotional products

Logo recognition is the most efficient way to maximize the interaction between customers and companies In fact, and pattern recognition, especially logo recognition has been explored since 1993 (Steven et al 2015) Logo detection and recognition found a various real applications To give an example, product brand recognition is to protect the intellectual property in e-commerce platforms, detect the means of transport, or manage a brand of goods on social media (Gao et al 2014) Many researchers were attracted and proposed different approaches for logo recognition like decision tree, KNN, and SVM model Although these methods have achieved promising results in recognition problems, this issue has still not solved completely and successfully yet by existing methods when the amount of data is increasing Therefore, by using CNN method has been presented a computational efficiency

In this paper, we provide an overview on the brand as well as the importance of recognizing brand Section 2 continues with some information on related work, including the brand recognition problem, some methods to detect the brand, after that comparing between these approaches In section 3, a deep learning method like CNN model to detect the brand will be illustrated This section also analyzes the dataset in recognition of brands and the results of evaluation, especially logo Finally, section 4 will end up with some conclusions and future work

2 Literature review

2.1 The importance of brand recognition

In ancient period, the brand is understood merely as identification to distinguish and

to affirm the value of goods and its ownership between those who make the same type of

goods With the development of a mass-produced commodity economy and the introduction of marketing theory from the mid-19th century, the concept of a brand is gradually broadening its meaning "Brand" has been widely used since the mid-20th century This is the original process to manage the creation of products and services, including how to create a unique feel for the products and services So, "branding" and

"brand management" also appear almost simultaneously

Brand awareness has also gradually improved In the past, it is believed that brand was to distinguish products and services from manufacturers According to Philip Kotler, brands are names, symbols, designs or a combination of these factors in order to identify unique goods It is distinguished from competitors' brands (Kotler et al 2002) With this traditional view, the brand is considered as a part of the goods and its main function is to distinguish its goods from competing products of the same type By the end of the 20th century, there were many changes in brand attitudes From the perspective of customers, the brand is a collection of all the factors that customers can remember about the brand such

as name, logo, image, etc By the time, it will gradually be created and occupied a clear position in the minds of customers Today, the brand is not only a signal to identify goods and businesses but also an image that lingers in the consumers’ minds The branding does not stop at giving the product a good name to easily remember or raising attractive slogans,

it also makes consumers to impress on their products, trust, and use your product As a result, branding is considered as one of the most vital important features of business’ strategy It seems to be that branding is central to generate the value of customer Nott just images, branding is also to become a primary tool in the process of creating and maintaining

a competitive advantage

The brand recognition is an perfect tool to promote brand name effectively, it is an asset that needs to be cared, managed and invested in a deep and long–term manner There are the significant benefits of brand recognition

For customer

A brand can help consumers easily distinguish goods to be purchased in numerous other similar goods This is to determine the original goods A good brand not only introduces the logo image professionally but also helps businesses become different and identifiable easily to customers Moreover, it also allows consumers to feel products and services more fully such as nice design, good quality, professional style, service attitude, etc

to evoke customers' needs

Each good provided by a different supplier will have a different name Therefore, consumers can easily identify the goods or services of each supplier through their brand This is illustrated by the fact that Coca-Cola is one of well-known soft drink that can easily

be duplicated as evident in the myriad of other colas in the market like Tab, and Pepsi Despite the fact that there are various other goods to choose from the loyal of consumers to Coca-Cola, they mostly tend to purchase their preferred brand as part of a consumers’ lifestyle (Kotler et al 2006) Most consumers always pay attention to the brand as well as consider about the supplier, their reputable So the brand is essentially an important

introduction for consumers to make a final decision on buying behavior It is a key factor to create customers' confidence and trust

For enterprise

Brand can create the image of businesses and products in customer mind-set Customers will choose goods through their perception When a brand first appears in the market, it has absolutely no image in the mind of customers The good attributes such as texture, shape, size, color, toughness, etc will be became the premise for consumers to choose them Through brand positioning, when each customer groups is formed, customer values are gradually asserted Traditional values are preserved as a focal point for creating

an image of the business Recollections of goods and clear brand differences will be the driving force to lead consumers to their businesses and goods This is an extremely valuable competitive advantage of traditional brands in the context of more and more new brands with outstanding uses and features appearing in the market Reputation and belief are not easy to obtain This is an intangible asset that brand brings to businesses As a result, the company has an advantage in attracting investment capital, raising its stock price in addition to customer trust and loyalty Brand recognition is an asset to help businesses grow, strengthen trust, this helps the company stand firm in the marketplace So, brand can improve the competitiveness for enterprise in the domestic and international market

Famous brands around the world such as Apple, Nike, etc., have successfully built their brands The benefits of brand identity bring millions of dollars, so businesses can not ignore the build yourself a brand identity with bold personality

Brand management’s activities can help enterprises to look for loyal customers based

on the information of positive associations and images or a strong brand’s awareness The image of brand is primary key to driver the equity of brand referring to the general perception of customers and their brand’s feeling It leads to have a negative consumer behavior The main idea of marketers is that their marketing activities should have a positive impact on the perception of customers as well as the customers’ attitude in order to build a brand in the mind of customers and the purchasing behavior of customers So it leads to not only increase sales but also maximize the market share and developing the equity of brand (Zhang 2015)

In conclusion it can be said that branding has a positive effects to the consumer as well as the enterprise Branding can impact on perceptions of consumers’ because values and character represented by the brand (Jooste 2005)

2.2 Some approaches to detect the brand

In recent years, brand recognition demand has attracted of many researchers with different approaches However, in logo detection and identification, it faces a great deal of difficulties and challenges because of recognition of object and classification matter as there

is not a clear definition about what a logo constitutes

A logo is considered as an icon using to identify an organization, goods or brand Logo not only is a graphic representation company’s name, a point of identification but also

are widely used in the marketing of products and services Logo have become a crucial part

of a company’s identity and even a good logo can increase a company’s value A logo usually has a recognizable and impressive graphic design, stylized name or attractive symbol for identifying a company called visual identity It can be seen anywhere by advertising campaign such as TV commercial, newspaper/magazine ads, billboards, flyers, transit advertising, etc

It is the fact that a logo can be considered as a brand’s artistic expression, it includes

a letter, text, picture, or any combination of these To illustrate the classification’s purpose, the appearance of some features such as color, texture, and shape are extracted However, the distinguishing logos in brands is difficult because of its color, its position in the provided images, specialized unknown fonts This matter has also large intra-class variations As an illustration that there are many types of logo existing the inter-class variations in a specific brand like old and new Adidas logos, small and big Nike versions Although there exists logos which belong to various brands, it seem to look similar with other brands (Figure 1)

Figure 1 The example of logo variations images (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

The main purpose of brand recognition is to recognize the goods’ brand name in the image of a real product There are many different views on brand identity Some researchers

in machine learning and pattern recognition domains shows that brand recognition is one

of the most classification tasks in multi-class image, where the input of image’s product will

be grouped into pre-defined brand classes Thanks to the development of techniques in a brand recognition, there are myriad of important applications built such as the guaranteeing intellectual property in e-commerce, the monitoring brand of a specific goods for business intelligence, and online marketing, etc It is considered to view as a task of multidimensional image classification but brand recognition cannot be solved directly by applying traditional image recognition techniques It is simply to classify which is based on the visual contents

of the whole product image This reason is that the same brand can have various types of

goods like bags, or shoes etc So the visual product images’ contents of the same brand could be completely differed

To deal with these above-mentioned challenges, we illustrate to detect the logo by popular techniques in brand recognition By recognizing the logo objects’ appearance related to a certain brand in an image of goods, the brand recognition task can be solved by

an effective approach As a result, the difficulties of brand recognition can be reduced into solving a logo detection task from real product images Finally, we show that a single brand can consist of multiple logo classes

There are some methods for brand recognition, in particular logo identification 2.2.1 Decision tree methods

Decision tree is known as classification and regression trees were introduced by (Breiman 1984) to refer decision tree algorithms which are supervised learning algorithm They are mostly used in non-linear decision making with simple linear decision surface

It is the fact that a decision tree is simplest to use in logo and non-logo regions classification It can be shown in Figure 2 In this decision tree, three features like weight and height, aspect ratio, and spatial density features in three steps will create the decision The sequence of this decision tree is formed based on making decision from low complexity through high complexity (Sina et al 2011)

(Source: Authors' extraction from Sina et al 2011) Figure 2 An Illustration of Decision Tree Classifier

2.2.2 K - Nearest Neighbor (KNN)

Besides other approaches in supervised learning, the simplest classifier is KNN algorithms in (Altman 1992)

In pattern recognition, K-Nearest Neighbor is classification algorithm that uses specific training patterns to predict class labels without building a classification model from data The new data samples need to be change class’ label that is layered based on its

Weight & height

Spatial density Non- Logo

Node 1

Node 2

Node 3

distance from all the samples in the training dataset There are many different distance measures, often using the Euclid distance to calculate the distance between objects The idea

of the algorithm is very simple, for a new data sample to classify the distance from that sample to all the samples in the training data set after finding the nearest neighbor with it The class label of the new data sample is the class label with the majority of elements in its neighbors Therefore, it can enhance the classification performance This idea of KNN extends by taking the k nearest points and assigning the majority label It is common to select k small and odd values to break ties (typically 1, 3 or 5) Larger k values help to reduce the noise examples in training dataset, and the choice of k is often performed through cross validation

2.2.3 Support Vector Machine (SVM)

Support vector machine (SVM) is a famous classification method introduced by Vapnik (Vapnik 1982), SVM is a binary classification method based on the maximum margin distance strategy Initially, SVM was designed for linear binary classification problem such

as handwritten character and digit recognition (LeCun et al 1995), face detection (Osuna et

al 1997), text categorization (Joachims 1998), and object detection in machine vision (Papageorgiou et al 1998) SVM is a supervised learning method for classification and regression analysis The goal of SVM is to build a hyperplane separating the two layers of data (negative and positive layers) so that the distance from this separated super plane to the points closest to it (called the margin) is maximized

Specifically, SVM belong to the class of maximum margin classifiers They perform pattern recognition between two classes by finding a decision surface that has maximum distance to the closest points in the training set which are termed support vectors We start with a training set xi∈Rn, i=1 N where xi in one of two identified classes by the label yi ∈{-1,1} Assuming linearly separable data, the goal of maximum margin classification is to separate the two classes by a hyperplane (Figure 3) As a result the distance to the support vectors is maximized (Heisele et al 2001)

Figure 3.The example of Hyperplane in Support Vector Machine (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

We focus on training data to find this decision boundary In this figure, the training datasets are support vector filled up with red and blue color

3 Methodology

3.1 Convolutional neural networks

In machine learning approach, deep learning has achievement in promising results

in the diversified object detection Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are units of the advanced deep learning models for recognition of object (Krizhevsky et al 2012) It helps us

to build intelligent systems with high accuracy today Another positive aspects is that CNN belongs a recurrent neural networks used to learn image representations being applied into computer vision (Huang et al 2015)

In particular, Deep CNNs includes multi-layers with linear and non-linear operations that are learned at the same time, in an end-to-end procedure To tackle with a specific task, the layers’ parameters are learned over several iterations In the recent years, CNN is considered as one of the most classification algorithm to extract some features from images and video data So, CNN recognition has been widely used as an efficient method

in the vehicle logo classification (Huang et al 2015; Thubsaeng et al 2014)

A CNN includes the layers of convolution and pooling occurring in an alternating fashion Convolution layers is one of the most layers in CNN structure It has two types, including Convolution Filter and Convolutional Layer In a normal neural network, from input, we go through the hidden layers and then output For CNN, the Convolutional Layer

is also a hidden layer, other than that, the Convolutional Layer is a set of feature maps and each of these feature maps is a scan of the original input, but is extracted to specific features / properties How to scan depends on the Convolution Filter or the kernel This is a matrix that will scan through the input data matrix, from left to right, top to bottom, and multiply corresponding values of the input matrix that the kernel matrix then sums up, giving via activation function (sigmoid, relu, elu, etc.), the result will be a specific number, the set of numbers is another matrix, which is the feature map The rest part of CNN is Pooling The purpose of pooling is that it reduces the number of hyperparameters that we need to calculate, thereby reducing calculation time, avoiding overfitting The most common type

of pooling is max pooling, taking the largest value in a pooling window Pooling works almost like a convolution, it also has a sliding window called a pooling window, this window slides through each value of the input data matrix (usually the feature map in the convolutional layer), picking a price values from the values in the sliding window (with max pooling we will get the maximum value)

3.2 Methodology of CNN

Applying Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been becoming significantly in various areas In 1998, LeCun and his team specially designed Convolutional Neural Networks to deal with the variability of 2D shapes which are shown to outperform all other techniques (Lecun et al 1998) A fast, fully parameterizable GPU implementation of Convolutional Neural Network variants for Image Classification is presented by Dan (Dan

et al 2011) Another team proposed two novel frontends for robust language identification (LID) by using a CNN trained for automatic speech recognition (ASR) Moreover, CNN are

used in Visual Recognition (Lecun et al 2010) and many other areas such as Facial Point Detection (Sun et al 2013), House Numbers Digit Classification (Lecun et al 2012), Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View Imagery (Goodfellow et al 2013)

A CNN being a type of feedforward network structure is formed by multiple layers

of convolutional filters alternated with subsampling filters followed by fully the connection

of layers

Convolution and sampling are the main components of basic processes in CNN algorithm

Convolution process uses a trainable filter fx, deconvoluted input image It includes two stages The first step is the input image which the input of the after convolution is the feature image of each layer, namely Feature Map After that adding a bias bx is happened

in the second step So, we can get convolution layer Cx

A sampling process: n pixels of each neighborhood through pooling steps, become

a pixel, and then by scalar weighting Wx + 1 weighted, add bias bx + 1, and then by an activation function, produce a narrow n times feature map Sx + 1

Figure 4 Basic CNN process (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

The Figure 5 shows the proposed CNN – based classification (Simone et al 2017)

Figure 5 Simplified logo classification (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

After training CNN, a threshold is given based on the top of the CNN predictions (see in Figure 6 and Figure 7) If the CNN prediction with the highest reliability is below this threshold, the annotated region is assigned as non-logo Otherwise CNN prediction is unchanged Figure 7 illustrates the testing framework of CNN training process With a test image, we extract the object proposals through algorithm used just like training Then, we proceed contrast normalization over each proposal (if enabled at training time), and feed them to the CNN The CNN predictions on the proposals are max-pooled and the class identified with highest confidence (eventually including the background class) is selected

If the CNN reliability for a logo class is above the threshold that has been learned in training,

the corresponding logo class is assigned to the image, otherwise the image is labeled as not containing any logo

Figure 6 Logo recognition training process (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

Figure 7 Logo recognition testing process (Source: Authors’ aggregation)

One of a numerous logo images in database to facilitate the computer vison research like logo detection and product brand recognition is LOGO-Net In the datasets of current LOGO-Net , there are 160 logo classes, 100 brands, 73,414 images, and a total of 130,608 logo objects manually labeled with bounding boxes by human beings An example image for each class of the LOGO-Net datasets is reported in Figure 8

Figure 8 Some logo images from the LOGO – Net dataset (Source: Authors' extraction from

LOGO-Net dataset)

“UoMLogo” dataset includes 5044 color logo images This database has a significant

in the number of color different logos collected from various sources such as universities, brands, sports, banks, insurance, cars, and industries etc This dataset is divided into three classes, including 1246 text image datasets, 627 symbol image datasets, 3171 the combination

of TEXT and SYMBOL datasets Within class, there exist ten different subclasses such as university, sport, bank, insurance, car, brand, Govt.&Political party, UNO media, and industry