Blog
The latest news from Google AI
A new landmark in computer vision
Monday, June 22, 2009
Posted by Jay Yagnik, Head of Computer Vision Research
[Cross-posted with the
Official Google Blog
]
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.
How did we do it? It wasn't easy. For starters, where do you find a good list of thousands of landmarks? Even if you have that list, where do you get the pictures to develop visual representations of the locations? And how do you pull that source material together in a coherent model that actually works, is fast, and can process an enormous corpus of data? Think about all the different photographs of the
Golden Gate Bridge
you've seen — the different perspectives, lighting conditions, and image qualities. Recognizing a landmark can be difficult for a human, let alone a computer.
Our research builds on the vast number of images on the web, the ability to search those images, and advances in object recognition and clustering techniques. First, we generated a list of landmarks relying on two sources: 40 million GPS-tagged photos (from
Picasa
and
Panoramio
) and online tour guide webpages. Next, we found candidate images for each landmark using these sources and
Google Image Search
, which we then "pruned" using efficient image matching and unsupervised clustering techniques. Finally, we developed a highly efficient indexing system for fast image recognition. The following image provides a visual representation of the resulting clustered recognition model:
In the above image, related views of the Acropolis are "clustered" together, allowing for a more efficient image matching system.
While we've gone a long way towards unlocking the information stored in text on the web, there's still much work to be done unlocking the information stored in pixels. This research demonstrates the feasibility of efficient computer vision techniques based on large, noisy datasets. We expect the insights we've gained will lay a useful foundation for future research in computer vision.
If you're interested to learn more about this research, check out the
paper
.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2021
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
