Google Cloud Platform in Action

Chapter 14. Cloud Vision: image recognition

This chapter covers

• An overview of image recognition
• The different types of recognition supported by Cloud Vision
• How Cloud Vision pricing is calculated
• An example evaluating whether profile images are acceptable

For humans, image recognition is one of those things that’s easy to understand but difficult to define. We can ask toddlers, “What’s this picture of?” and get an answer, but asking “Explain to me what it means to recognize an image.” will probably get a blank stare. To move into a slightly more philosophical area, you might say that we know what it means to “understand an image” but find it tough to explain clearly what exactly constitutes that understanding.

It’s difficult to get a computer ...