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Google’s New Technique To See Pictures, Rather Than Merely Read Captions

Written by Evan Schuman
April 28th, 2008

Google says it has concocted a better way of searching for Web images, one that involves image-recognition to “see” what the image depicts as opposed to just reading the accompanying text.

This technique, called Visual Rank, has tremendous potential to shake up E-Commerce, which heavily relies on product images. The details were discussed by Google last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, where two Google scientists described Visual Rank as “an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” according to this New York Times story.

Posted in E-Commerce, Software
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