Layout-aware, scalable recognition system

Described herein is a mechanism for visual recognition of items or visual search using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of text in images. Recognized OCR blocks in an image comprise position information and recognized text. The embodiments utilize a location-aware feature vector created using the position and recognized information in each recognized block. The location-aware features of the feature vector utilize position information associated with the block to calculate a weight for the block. The recognized text is used to construct a tri-character gram frequency, inverse document frequency (TGF-IDP) metric using tri-character grams extracted from the recognized text. Features in location-aware feature vector for the block are computed by multiplying the weight and the corresponding TGF-IDF metric. The location-aware feature vector for the image is the sum of the location-aware feature vectors for the individual blocks.