Using Google Vision AI's Reverse Image Search To Richly Catalog Television News

Deep learning has revolutionized the machine understanding of imagery. Yet today's image recognition models are still limited by the availability of large annotated training datasets upon which to build their libraries of recognized objects and activities. To address this, Google's Vision AI API expands its native catalog of around 10,000 visually recognized objects and activities with the ability to perform the equivalent of a reverse Google Images search across the open Web and tally up the top topics used to caption the given image everywhere it has previously appeared, lending unprecedentedly rich context and understanding, even yielding unique labels for breaking news events. What might this process yield for a week of television news? Google's Vision AI API represents a unique hybrid between traditional deep learning-based image labeling based on a library of previously trained models and the ability to leverage the open Web to annotate images based on the most common topics visually similar images are captioned with. Using its Web Entities feature, the Vision AI API performs what amounts to a reverse Google Images search over the open Web, identifying images across the entire Web that look most similar to the given image.