Cross-Modal Retrieval Patents: Leaders & Filing Trends 2026
- Filings quadrupled in three years. Documented cross-modal and multimodal retrieval filings grew from 72 in 2021 to 351 in 2024, a +388% rise over that span — and 2024 is the last year the trend can be read as complete.
- The field is still open at the top. The leading assignee holds 139 records out of 2,230, and the top 5 combined account for just 14.7% of all records in scope — no single company has locked down the claim space.
- G06F and G06N dominate, but coverage past them thins fast. 75.7% of records sit in G06F and 40.2% in G06N, while healthcare informatics (G16H, 5.2%) and speech/audio (G10L, 4.8%) carry far fewer filings relative to the core.
Filing growth compares 2021 (72 records) with 2024 (351) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 2,230 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent activity around cross-modal and multimodal retrieval — systems that map images, text, audio or video into a shared embedding space so that a query in one modality can retrieve results in another. The search spans cross modal retrieval, multimodal embedding, image-text retrieval and related terms across 2,230 records published between 2015 and 2026.
Filing activity is concentrated in electric digital data processing and AI-model computing classes, with smaller but distinct pockets in commerce, image recognition, healthcare informatics and speech processing. The assignee base is led by a handful of large technology filers, but the top 10 combined still cover under a fifth of all records, leaving substantial room for new entrants to stake out specific application claims.
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Filing trend and technology composition
The two views below show how fast the field is moving and where filings actually sit once broken out by IPC subclass.
Filings climbed sharply from 2021 onward
Annual filings rose from 30 in 2017 to a documented peak of 677 in 2025, with 2021-to-2024 alone showing +388% growth (72 to 351). 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in as publications lag behind filing dates by roughly 18 months, so the most recent two years should not be read as a slowdown.
Filings cluster in two core classes, then fragment
G06F (75.7% of records) and G06N (40.2%) anchor the field as the general data-processing and AI-model substrate. Below that, G06Q (13.3%), G06V (10.0%) and G06T (8.4%) mark distinct application layers, while G16H, G10L and G06K each sit under 6% — evidence of real but comparatively thin coverage in healthcare, speech and recognition-specific claims.
Shares are the percentage of the 2,230 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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Try EurekaA recent claim shows where the field is heading
Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Visual Question Answering
Systems and methods for visual question answering that obtain a multimodal input, generate a multimodal embedding, perform a search based on that embedding, determine a relevant passage from the results, and process the input and passage with a generative model to produce a response. The generative model is described as configured to orchestrate multimodal searches, rank results, determine relevant passages and generate the final response.This pattern — embedding generation feeding a search step that feeds a generative model — is the structure most recent filings in this space follow.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US6850252B1 | Intelligent electronic appliance system and method | 4,059 |
| 2 | US6400996B1 | Adaptive pattern recognition based control system and method | 2,342 |
| 3 | US6640145B2 | Media recording device with packet data interface | 1,591 |
| 4 | US20070053513A1 | Intelligent electronic appliance system and method | 1,452 |
| 5 | US7006881B1 | Media recording device with remote graphic user interface | 1,218 |
| 6 | US7813822B1 | Intelligent electronic appliance system and method | 1,198 |
| 7 | US6510406B1 | Inverse inference engine for high performance web search | 720 |
| 8 | US20060200253A1 | Internet appliance system and method | 558 |
| 9 | US20020151992A1 | Media recording device with packet data interface | 501 |
| 10 | US6862710B1 | Internet navigation using soft hyperlinks | 493 |
Citation counts reward older filings that have had more time to accumulate references — read them as a signal of historical influence, not current relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for filing strategy
Three patterns stand out once the raw counts are broken down by year, class and assignee.
The field's growth curve is real and recent
Filings went from 72 in 2021 to 351 in 2024. That is a genuine acceleration, not an artefact of a longer search window, and it means prior art from even three years ago may already be outdated by claim scope filed since.
No single filer controls the space
The leading assignee holds 139 records; the top 5 combined hold 328, or 14.7% of all 2,230 records in scope. That leaves the large majority of filings spread across a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants.
Core infrastructure claims dominate, application claims trail
Three in four records touch G06F (electric digital data processing) and two in five touch G06N (AI-model computing). Healthcare informatics, speech processing and recognition-specific classes each sit under 11% — these are the branches with proportionally lighter claim density.
China and the US lead filing volume, India is a fast-growing third
China's receiving office recorded 832 filings and the US 759, with India at 283 and WIPO PCT filings at 167. Any freedom-to-operate check for this space needs to clear at least these three jurisdictions before Europe or Australia.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to vector databases & retrieval — cross-modal vector retrieval patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and who is accelerating
The leaderboard mixes large diversified technology filers with at least one fast-moving academic institution — and several of the historically largest filers have gone quiet in the most recent year.
One filer leads by a wide margin over fifth place
The top-ranked assignee holds 139 records against 37 at fifth place and 13 at tenth — a steep drop-off that suggests the leader's position rests on sustained, broad filing rather than a single concentrated push.
An academic filer is growing fastest right now
Vellore Institute of Technology filed 16 records in the latest year, up 129% year-on-year — the only tracked assignee still accelerating while several large corporate filers show year-on-year declines of 80% or more.
Co-assignment is rare and concentrated in one pairing
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, and the strongest single pairing accounts for 21 joint records — far ahead of any other pair, which sit at 2. Collaborative filing is not yet a common strategy in this field.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| VELLORE INSITUTE OF TECH | 16 | +129% |
| Google LLC | 6 | -81% |
| Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC | 1 | -89% |
| Adobe Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Korea) | 0 | -100% |
| Beijing Baidu Netcom Science & Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Searete LLC | 0 | — |
| HOFFBERG STEVEN M | 0 | — |
Where to take this
The dataset points to a field still forming its claim boundaries rather than one settling into consolidation.
Check freedom to operate before filing in core classes
With 75.7% of records in G06F and 40.2% in G06N, any new filing that touches general embedding generation or retrieval architecture needs a targeted prior-art search in those two classes first.
Run a novelty check in Eureka →Watch the academic filer accelerating against the trend
Vellore Institute of Technology's 129% year-on-year growth stands out against declining large-corporate filers — worth tracking for licensing or collaboration signals before the position solidifies.
Track assignee activity in Eureka →Scope claims toward the thinner application classes
Healthcare informatics, speech/audio and recognition-specific classes each carry under 11% of records — a narrower but potentially clearer path to allowable claims than the crowded G06F/G06N core.
Explore white space in Eureka →Common questions about this landscape
Documented filings rose from 72 in 2021 to 351 in 2024, a growth of +388% over that three-year span. This is based on complete-year data only; 2025 and 2026 figures will keep rising as more publications catch up, since publication typically lags filing by around 18 months. The underlying trend shows a peak of 677 published records in 2025, but that figure is still provisional.
The ranking covers 100 assignees, led by a filer with 139 records, with fifth place at 37 and tenth place at 13 — a steep drop after the leader. The top 5 assignees combined hold 14.7% of all 2,230 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 19.3%, meaning the majority of filings sit outside the ranked leaders in a long tail of smaller filers. Large technology companies dominate the upper ranks, but no single filer controls the field.
Most records sit in G06F (electric digital data processing, 75.7% of records) and G06N (AI-model computing, 40.2%). Secondary areas include G06Q for commerce applications (13.3%), G06V for image/video recognition (10.0%) and G06T for image data processing (8.4%). Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100%, and each should be read against the full 2,230-record total rather than against each other.
China's receiving office recorded the most filings at 832, followed by the United States at 759 and India at 283. WIPO PCT filings added 167 and Europe's EPO 106, with Australia at 19. Anyone assessing freedom to operate in this space should prioritise China and the US before other jurisdictions, given the volume gap.
Yes, by the concentration figures: the top 5 assignees hold only 14.7% of all 2,230 records, and the top 10 hold 19.3%, leaving most of the field spread across single- and few-filing entrants. Filing volume is also still accelerating, with +388% growth from 2021 to 2024, suggesting claim boundaries are still being drawn rather than settled. That said, the two dominant IPC classes, G06F and G06N, are densely occupied, so new filings are more likely to find room in adjacent application classes like healthcare informatics or speech processing.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.