Future: Image Recognition And Google Street View
I came across news of a company out of Europe who has perfected an image recognition technology that can actually pick out aspects of an image such as buildings, people, etc., and hyperlink them. When associated with mobile devices, the possibilities are endless.
The new system, dubbed “MOBVIS” can recognise individual buildings, for example, in a photo you take with your camera-phone. It can then apply icons that hyperlink to information about the building. Simply by looking at a picture, the system knows where you are and can tell what you are looking at. If you’re like me, this sounds like something that would be perfect for Google’s Street View. A lot of people have wondered what the point of Street View is and why Google would make such an investment out of capturing that much imagery.
Beyond Google’s sheer desire to capture and organize the world’s information, Street View will enable yet another monetization platform for advertising and other future ventures. The MOBVIS image recognition platform seems like a perfect example of something that would be perfect for Street View. If all the imagery Google captures for Street View could be hyperlink and monetized, it would not only be very beneficial for Google, but also advertisers who want to capitalize on a new-age ultra-targeted form of mobile advertising.
This integration is already being done actually. One of the MOBVIS project’s partners, Tele Atlas, is already using the platform together with a fleet of vans to gather imagery to feed to the platform. It’s just like Street View, but at its infancy. If you ask me, it would have been easier and more beneficial to team with Google for testing. Google will likely introduce their own image-recognition based solution for Street View on its own- that, or purchase a startup that’s already perfected it. Either way, it’s pretty cool, and promising for the future of Street View and all that data.
