Scientists at Google have created artificial intelligence software that can describe the contents of photographs far more accurately than ever before. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30100184
The machine-learning software developed by Google used two neural networks – one which deals with image recognition, the other with natural language processing.
Neural networking is a computational model that mimics some of the same architecture used in the brain. Such systems have a series of interconnected neurons which can take information from a variety of sources and are also capable of learning.
The neural network developed by Google was the work of four scientists – Oriol Vinyals, Alexander Toshev, Samy Bengio and Dumitru Erhan.
“A picture may be worth a thousands words,” they wrote on the Google Research blog.
“But sometimes it’s the words that are the most useful – so it’s important we figure out ways to translate from images to words automatically and accurately.”
Two years ago Google researchers created image-recognition software and showed it 10 million images taken from YouTube videos. After three days the programme had taught itself how to pick out pictures of cats.