Google's latest free gift? Millions of captioned images to help train AI systems

Google's Open Images dataset consists of nine million links to web images and descriptions of the objects they contain. Google's latest gift to the public is a dataset of about nine million links to labeled images to help train computer-vision systems. The dataset, called Open Images, provides links to images on the web that have been annotated with descriptions of objects within the image. It consists of'machine-populated' annotations, as well as annotations validated by humans to weed out false positives. According to Google Research's team, the dataset is large enough to enable researchers to use it to train a deep neural network "from scratch".