On December 2, Google announced the release of the Google Cloud Vision API, an application programming interface that gives developers access to its powerful and nuanced image recognition technology. Developers can use the Google Cloud Vision API to categorize images, identify faces and read words and characters within images hailing from multiple languages. Google’s face identification technology allows users to identify the appearance of faces within an image in conjunction with the probability that a face has a specific emotion such as joy or sadness. The API also enables the identification of popular landmarks and its associated latitude and longitude. Available in limited preview, the API gives users a glimpse of Google’s powerful image recognition technology and throws open the door toward the larger project of adding metadata to unstructured data. As scale-out storage platforms for structured and unstructured data proliferate, the Google Cloud Vision API represents a powerful tool that developers can use to add metadata to tag, organize and classify image files.
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