Microsoft, five other groups race toward automated image captioning

Did you ever think that the next hot technology field would be the ability for a machine to "see" a picture and describe it in words? Google may have kicked off the latest wave of interest in automated image recognition, but several teams of researchers, including Microsoft and Baidu, also plan to participate. Microsoft said late Tuesday that the company launched a research project over the summer, where the results were convincing enough to fool humans about 20 percent or so of the time. Microsoft will publish its results in a paper, which will be presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June 2015. However, John Platt, a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research, also wrote that he expects papers to be submitted by a team of Baidu and UCLA researchers, as well as teams from U.C. Berkeley; Google; and Stanford and the University of Toronto.