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Visual lookup technology

How does visual lookup (also known as image recognition) work. I’m guessing that there is a table of image types (plants, trees, rocks, statues, etc.) in iOS and that once you opt to recognize the specific image in your photo that the iOS connects to a database for that type of image and lists what it is or the choices. Am I correct on this? Thanks.

Posted on Feb 18, 2023 7:13 AM

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Feb 18, 2023 7:47 AM in response to ChuckDVM

At its simplest, a whole lot of statistics calculations; of certain parts of images probably being certain things.


Apple has substantial machine learning research online:

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research


AFAIK, Apple hasn’t documented the technical details of Visual Look Up, though general info and related is available, as are the available application programming interfaces (APIs):

On-device APIs - Machine Learning - Apple Developer


Here is a list of what can purportedly be classified; a list of results the statistics might (correctly or otherwise) infer:

httphttps://pysource.com/2020/10/20/create-a-simple-image-classifier/


Apple has documented more about the statistical recognition of people.


Here are papers from Apple research describing details of how people are recognized:

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/face-detection (2017)

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-people-photos (2021)


The statistics sometimes don’t always work as intended, either:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/08/typographic-attack-pen-paper-fool-ai-thinking-apple-ipod-clip


As happened with Microsoft Tay, “Adversarial training” is a thing, too.


There are other image classifiers around from other sources that are documented:

https://pysource.com/2020/10/20/create-a-simple-image-classifier/


Yes, the term “machine learning” within computer programming is arguably another name for some forms of what mathematicians call statistics. With hardware, and side-effects.


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Visual lookup technology

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