Image identification

Stephen Wolfram, writing on the Wolfram blog:

“What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when. I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of intelligence, much of it far beyond the human level. And for a long time we’ve been integrating all that intelligence into the Wolfram Language.

Now I’m excited to be able to say that we’ve reached a milestone: there’s finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, “What is this a picture of?”—and get an answer.

And today we’re launching the Wolfram Language Image Identification Project on the web to let anyone easily take any picture (drag it from a web page, snap it on your phone, or load it from a file) and see what ImageIdentify thinks it is.

Here’s a link to the ImageIdentify page. Drop some pictures on it, help it learn.

I dropped an image of Jim onto the page and it said Jim was a person (and not a bearded wonder, which is what I expected). I dropped an image of an Apple Watch and ImageIdentify called it an analog watch.

Needs a bit of work, but definitely interesting.