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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.07389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [High-Throughput Vector Similarity Search in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01926/) (2023)
- [Navigable Proximity Graph-Driven Native Hybrid Queries with Structured and Unstructured Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13601/) (2022)
- [Cloud-Native Vector Search: A Comprehensive Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14748/) (2025)
- [Product Re-identification System in Fully Automated Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10324/) (2021)
- [AddrLLM: Address Rewriting via Large Language Model on Nationwide Logistics Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13584/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms on Transformer-based Embedding Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21989/) (2025)
- [Scalable Disk-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Page-Aligned Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25487/) (2025)
- [OneVision: An End-to-End Generative Framework for Multi-view E-commerce Vision Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05759/) (2025)
- [CRINN: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02091/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Product Deduplication in E-Commerce with Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15858/) (2025)
- [All-in-one Graph-based Indexing for Hybrid Search on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00855/) (2025)
- [Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Vector Databases: System Design and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11443/) (2026)
- [Efficient K-generalizable Learned Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06159/) (2026)
- [Cardinality Estimation for High Dimensional Similarity Queries with Adaptive Bucket Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04603/) (2026)
- [FAVOR: Efficient Filter-Agnostic Vector ANNS Based on Selectivity-Aware Exclusion Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07770/) (2026)
- [ANNLib: A Development Framework for Efficient Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17582/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.