Google Goggles, long a Lab project for search and image recognition, has been available on Android since December. The Google Mobile Blog has announced that it's now available free for the iPhone....
Google Goggles now available on iPhone in Google Mobile App
Google Mobile Blog
Tuesday, October 5, 2010 Computer vision is a hard problem and Google Goggles is still a Labs product. It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games. However, it doesn’t yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food.
This limitation is understandable. Most object recognition software needs some sort of data to put it in a context, as in GPS data and/or a landmark or object name, and then it compares data points... things like the corners of polygons, with existing data on file for that landmark or object. Over time, I assume that Google adds data to its repository of data about a place or object... and, with each bit of additional information, a more detailed model is constructed.
Google would also have meta data about the object or place itself on file... as well as data about the surrounding location. Think 'Place Pages back end'.
With books and DVDs, I'm assuming there's OCR capability of some sort to identify a title, and then perhaps Google jumps to meta data and previous images, most likely before they try computationally intensive image-matching efforts. I'm sure Google has identified optimal strategies, and/or that these strategies are evolving over time.
Organisms that move of course present a much more difficult identification and modeling problem, as they have orientation and physical variations, have limbs that move, may even have fur or hair which can present quite a challenge, and they aren't rectilinear.
On the mobile blog announcement, the app is demoed with a short video.
I would think, btw, that Google Goggles will eventually be a major part of Google's mobile search strategy going forward, for both places and products. A phone-based camera interface is a natural, and is an example of the kind of "augmented reality" applications that Google is developing.
See previous WebmasterWorld discussion on Google Goggles here....
Google Goggles - search by submitting a photo http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4039028.htm [webmasterworld.com]
