Google is bullish on image recognition. Google envisions a world in which a person’s camera phone will serve as an image-based gateway to digital information. In December, the company launched “Google Goggles,” an Android application that matches camera phone pictures to a back-end image library (think of Google’s vast image library) to access information about the item a person snaps a photo of. If you are familiar with Snaptell, LinkMe Mobile, Pongr, or Kooaba, you are already comfortable with the idea of taking a picture of a book cover, movie poster, DVD, and receiving information about the item instantaneously.
At the Augmented Reality Event yesterday, Google product manager Shailesh Nalawadi confirmed that the company’s mobile visual search tool would be making its way to the iPhone in the near future. Even more exciting was Nalawadi’s announcement that Google plans to release access to its image recognition technology via APIs by year’s end.
“APIs are good and we would love to offer recognition capabilities as APIs eventually,” Nalawadi said.
In making image recognition technology readily accessible to mobile developers, applications can be created that explore the depth of use cases that such a feature enables. Traditional publishers could embed image recognition into their native apps. Readers could snap photos of images within a newspaper to seamlessly access more information. Integrating image recognition into a sports stadium experience , could lead to the develpment of games in which fans capture visual answers to sports-related trivia questions as they move throughout a venue.
By opening the Google Goggles platform via APIs and making the application available on the iPhone, image recognition will have a greater opportunity to stretch to the masses.