[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Google: We?ve Made a Breakthrough in Image Search here

[thommoboy]

I hate to be the devil's advocate here, but this statement is pretty misleading (once you read the paper):
bq. 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
In the paper, this is not quite the case. The system actually only uses 5312 landmarks (off by a factor of 10), and they only evaluate with 963 of these. They test 728 landmark images from 124 landmarks, and it correctly identifies 337 (46%) of the landmark images. It also correctly guessed that 417 are landmarks of some sort (e.g. that the Eiffel tower is "a landmark"). The 80% number comes from the fact that of the items that were classified as "landmarks", it correctly identified which landmark it is (337/417).

That's an interesting interpretation of accuracy: if it misses something completely, no problem, doesn't count :) It's kind of like a student taking an exam and saying "I didn't answer questions 3-5, so you can't count them!"
I believe the more accurate statement would be:
bq. ...efficiently identify images of 124 landmarks from all over the world with 46% accuracy
But, hey, that's a tougher sell.

[yankeeDDL]

Nice. Looking forward to see it in action. Go Google!

[Evolution2001]

Next up after landmarks, facial recognition. After that, Skynet becomes self-aware. :^0

[rasmasyean]

They are probably scalling up their effors because the Bing image search apparently used pattern recognition and has some decent results. It's not "100%" either, but for certain types of images (like portraits), it does a pretty decent job. So Google is finally feeling a little "threatened" and has to respond.

[malcolme]

For a better application for Visual pattern Recognition check out Evolution Robotics at www.evolution.com and the ViPR engine