When Google released the Cloud Vision API last month I started to think of the interesting ways that artificially intelligent image recognition could be used.  One idea that jumped to mind was enhancing the ability to search for marketing images and stock photography in a digital asset management system.

As much as companies encourage individuals to tag and annotate images accurately, invariably the metadata is poor or missing altogether.  What if we could use artificial intelligence to add metadata to images automatically at the time they are uploaded to the system?  Could this new metadata make it easier or faster to find images?

Google’s Cloud Vision API and IBM Watson’s AlchemyVision API both provide this service.  And Adobe is incorporating this features natively into their AEM DAM, calling it Smart Tags.  I have tested the Google and IBM services and initially found that the Google Cloud Vision API returned more metadata for each image, and was slightly more precise with the labels it suggested.  I will continue to test these services as they advance, but for this post, I am going to focus on giving my impressions of the Google Cloud Vision API.