Google announces new machine learning function called ‘Video Intelligence API’

Google has a knack for shocking the world by revealing the futuristic projects it’s working on.

Recently however, the Mountain View, California-based company, surprised attendees of the Google Next Cloud conference when it demoed a new way to parse video by utilizing machine learning techniques.

Google’s new “Video Intelligence API” was able to identify a dachshund in a commercial being demonstrated on stage by Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud. 

Furthermore, the API was able to understand that the video as a whole was a commercial, rather than any other kind of video content. During another demonstration, the audience saw that a simple search for “beach” resulted in the API locating videos with beaches in them, complete with timestamps included.

“The API is the first of its kind, enabling developers to easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities (nouns such as “dog,” “flower” or “human” or verbs such as “run,” “swim” or “fly”) inside video content. It can even provide contextual understanding of when those entities appear; for example, searching for “Tiger” would find all precise shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google Cloud Storage,” said Google in a post on its Google Cloud Platform blog. 

While this reveal may sound uneventful, before now, in most cases computers have not able to understand the content of a video without reading manually inputted tags. Google is making this API available to developers just as it has with other machine learning APIs.

When it comes to machine learning services, Google is significantly behind companies like Amazon and Microsoft. Technologies like its new “Video Intelligence API” could push Google into the running to become a major competitor in the space.

Source: Google