The software’s description of pictures was similar to that written by a human. As well as making it easier to search for images, the software could be used to help blind people understand pictures better, Google said. Stanford University has also announced a breakthrough in the same field.
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."