Google's Object Recognition Technology

Google continues to improve its image recognition technology. A Google team placed first in the classification and detection tasks of the ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge, the largest academic challenge in computer vision.

"Superior performance in the detection challenge requires pushing beyond annotating an image with a 'bag of labels' - a model must be able to describe a complex scene by accurately locating and identifying many objects in it," explains Google. Here's are some examples of object detection:

"This effort was accomplished by using the DistBelief infrastructure, which makes it possible to train neural networks in a distributed manner and rapidly iterate. At the core of the approach is a radically redesigned convolutional network architecture," mentions Google. The goal is to train large models for deep neural networks.

Last year, Google used the DistBelief infrastructure to improve some models used by the winning team at ImageNet and implemented the algorithms in Google+ Photos Search and later in Google Drive's search engine. Google automatically annotates images and it allows you to search for things like "car" or "laptop" and find images that include them.

Google promises to use the latest achievements to improve "Google products such as photo search, image search, YouTube, self-driving cars, and any place where it is useful to understand what is in an image as well as where things are".

New Android Apps in Chrome OS

Google built an app runtime for Chrome that allows Android apps to run in Chrome OS. The first Android apps you can run in Chrome OS are Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words and Vine.

Bringing more powerful apps to Chrome OS is a great idea. Making it easier to bring mobile apps to Chrome encourages developers to go beyond web apps and write native apps that work offline, include hardware integration and work outside of the browser. While cross-platform web apps are still useful, the new Chrome apps can bring some missing features that people expect to find in native apps. "These combine the best of websites and native applications — they're available offline, are always up to date, and they can communicate with devices like USB drives & Bluetooth speakers," explains Google.

"These first apps are the result of a project called the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta), which we announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. Over the coming months, we'll be working with a select group of Android developers to add more of your favorite apps so you'll have a more seamless experience across your Android phone and Chromebook," informs Google. You can tell Google what Android apps you'd like to be ported to Chrome.

For now, the first 4 apps can only be installed in Chrome OS, but I'm sure that Google will add support for Chrome in the near future.

It's interesting to notice that the apps aren't manually ported to Chrome, as I assumed. Here's an explanation from a Google employee:

"The app code is all running on top of the Chrome platform, specifically inside of Native Client. In this way the ARC (Android Runtime for Chrome) apps run in the same environment as other apps you can download from the Chrome Web Store, even though they are written on top of standard Android APIs. The developers do not need to port or modify their code, though they often choose to improve it to work well with the Chromebook form factor (keyboard, touchpad, optional touchscreen, etc)."

Here's an APK for Duolingo (Android app) inside the CRX file (Chrome app):

Google Drive's Third-Party Apps

One of the most important Google Drive features is the support for third-party apps. Now you're no longer limited to Google's word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation app and you can use web apps developed by other companies.

Google released a SDK for Google Drive apps and there are already 18 apps that use it. Users are required to install a Chrome app from the Chrome Web Store for each Google Drive app, but they don't have to use Chrome. Google's dev blog informs that "Drive apps are distributed from the Chrome Web Store and can be used with any modern browser." I've managed to install apps in Firefox and Opera, but not in IE9.

To integrate a third-party app with Google Drive, the app sends you to a page that asks for your permission. The authorization process fails if you load the page without installing the Chrome Web Store app. As Google says, "apps will not have any API access to files unless the app has been installed in Chrome Web Store." Chrome apps are only used to allow the third-party apps to use the Drive API, but they can be uninstalled immediately after they're installed and all the features will work in Chrome and any other browser.

At the moment, Drive apps don't integrate with Chrome, but that's likely to happen in the future. Chromebooks would be a lot more useful if you could sync files with Google Drive and open them using web apps.

Google Drive Google Goggles

Google Drive Goggles

Google Drive has the most powerful image search technology you can find in an online storage service. It uses Google Goggles technology to recognize objects, logos, landmarks, text and much more, so you can find an image even if the filename is a.jpg. The most impressive thing is that the processing happens as soon as you upload the images and there's no setting to enable.

For example, Google Drive found an image of the Android statue from the Googleplex when searching for [Android].

It also found a screenshot of Google's homepage and a Chrome logo when searching for [Google], this time using OCR technology.

"Let's say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time," explains Google.

Google's Zerg Rush

Google has a new Easter Egg: search for [zerg rush] and you'll notice that search results will start to disappear, destroyed by zerglings. Your mission is to save the search results and kill the zerglings using your clicks, but it's not easy.

According to KnowYourMeme, "Zerg Rush is a popular online gaming term used to describe an overwhelming scale of attack carried out by one player against another in real time strategy (RTS) games. The term originates from the popular RTS game Starcraft, in which the Zerg race is notoriously known for its ability to mass-produce offensive units within a short time frame, thus allowing the player to overpower the opponent by sheer number."

When the game is over, Google lets you post your results to Google+ and shows the message "GG", a cryptic way to say "Good Game".

{ Thanks, Mati. }