ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,288,238, issued on April 29, was assigned to eBay Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

"Complementary item recommendation system" was invented by Shuya Li (Shanghai), Yi Yu (Shanghai) and Yuyangzi Fu (Nantong, China).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A recommendation system leverages multi-target search to provide item listing recommendations and/or query suggestions. For a given input image with multiple objects, multi-target search uses object detection to detect each object, and stores complementary object data associating each object from the image. Additionally, a search of an item listing datastore is performed using each object from the image as a...