Science fiction books and movies have long imagined that computers will someday be able to see and interpret the world. At Google, we think computer vision has tremendous potential benefits for consumers, which is why we’re dedicated to research in this area. And today, a Google team is presenting a paper on landmark recognition (think: Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower) at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Florida. In the paper, we present a new technology that enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy.
To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it’s cool. For our demonstration, we begin with an unnamed, untagged picture of a landmark, enter its web address into the recognition engine, and poof — the computer identifies and names it: “Recognized Landmark: Acropolis, Athens, Greece.” Thanks computer.